The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 10

“Have you ever been to America?” John said, suddenly.

“What?” Ellie said, hearing a question and shifting her attention back to him.

“Have you been to America?”

“Fuck no,” Ellie said. “Why would I?”

John shrugged. Something about his expression made Ellie think he agreed with her. “Why not?” he said anyway. “For a holiday. To see the monuments of a fallen civilization.”

Ellie supposed he had a point. America wasn’t much fun any more, but people went all the same. A lot of people. Adventure tourism was about all the American economy was good for now.

“I’ve seen documentaries,” Ellie said. “That’ll do me.”

“We’d like you to go.”

“All right,” Ellie said.

John seemed surprised.

“Of course I’ll go,” Ellie said. “You’re holding my kid hostage. So I’ll go.”

“You don’t want to know what we’d like you to do?”

“Not really. Because holding my kid hostage. Find someone or kill someone, I assume.”

John seemed surprised again.

“We’re a hunt team,” Ellie said, bored again. “For fuck’s sake. What else would you want me to do?”

John seemed to accept that. He looked back to his tablet, and began flicking through pages. He cleared his throat, about to start talking again, and Ellie had a horrible feeling he was about to begin another long speech. Ellie sighed, and held out her hand.

John looked at her.

“Just let me read,” Ellie said. “It’s quicker.”

“Of course,” John said, and handed her the tablet.

Ellie read. It was about what she’d expected. Not good, not bad, mostly just complicated. The son of a senior executive of their Shanghai parent corporation had gone missing. He was somewhere in the old United States, on his post-university gap year. He was touring the wonders of America, seeing Nashville and Detroit and Los Angeles, and somewhere along the way he had disappeared. There was no ransom demand, and no communication. Just his trackers and monitors had suddenly gone dead, the way they always did in tunnels and near the last remaining US government facilities, which still always had cell jammers. The trackers had gone dead, and then never restarted.

That had been three days ago. Now the corporate headquarters was starting to panic.

The company had made inquiries through diplomatic channels, and through their debt-recovery officials too, which Ellie would have expected to be more effective. Neither had done very much good. The file John had on his tablet detailed a great many unsuccessful attempt to do anything useful, including covert interviews with friends, a statistical analysis of the kid’s spending patterns, and reports from the corporate tech services division about their unsuccessful attempts to restart the trackers remotely. Ellie hadn’t realized that was possible, but it was quite useful to know it was.

She kept reading, ignoring John’s tense expression as she flicked pages sideways on his tablet without bothering to ask. There were other reports, the best they could do she supposed, giving an approximate location based on satellite triangulation somewhere in the middle of the country and a little towards the north. This was confirmed by financial records and the locations of his last few bank transactions. There were attempts to contact the friends he had been travelling with, who still seemed to be New York. The group had separated weeks ago, and no-one had mentioned this to their respective parents until now.

There were more memos. A lot of speculative, guesswork memos, the same kind as people in Shanghai wrote about Ellie’s operations in Afghanistan. Ellie read them anyway, but they didn’t tell her much. One of them, the most sensible, a background briefing document for second-tier managers, said quite calmly that the US was a shambles. A failing-state shambles of poverty and debt-slavery and complex tribal tensions, at war with itself as much as any actual rival. Probably the corporate son had been snatched by anti-debt terrorists and was going to be ransomed, or murdered. Or he’d been snatched by some faction seeking assistance from the corporation against a rival. Or by slavers. But probably one or the other of those. The person who had written the memo fairly obviously thought the corporate son was already dead, but made a point of not actually saying so.

Ellie thought the corporate son was dead, too. Any sensible insurgent would have killed him and hidden the body as soon as they worked out who he was.

She sighed. She thought about Naomi.

It was a terrible waste of time bothering to do this, to go hunting for an already-dead heir. But she had to. The corporate parent would probably want the body back, if nothing else.

“We’ll go,” Ellie said.

John nodded.

“I suppose there’s no point asking you to release my daughter, since I’ll do what you want anyway.”

“There’s no point, no.”

“I’ll kill you if you harm her.”

“I assumed.”

Ellie looked around, at the cameras on the backup team. Then she looked upwards. People always looked upwards, towards imaginary unseen cameras on the ceiling, even though the cameras were as likely to be on other people, or on the floor.

She assumed she was being watched in Shanghai. Probably not by the kid’s parent, who most likely didn’t know the full details of this brilliant plan, but by the kid’s parent’s close advisers, at least.

“If anything happens to my daughter,” Ellie said. “I’ll kill you all. You know what I do. You know what I can do if I want to. If my daughter is hurt at all, even by accident, I’ll blame you and I’ll kill all of you.”

John nodded as she spoke, as if he was listening on an earpiece. He probably was, Ellie thought.

“They say they understand,” John said. “Your daughter won’t be hurt.”

“Even if I fail? Even if I die?”

“If you do your best, your daughter won’t be hurt.”

Ellie nodded. That was as much as she could hope for. “We’ll need weapons,” she said. “And armor. Proper armor.”

“I’ll arrange it.”

Ellie nodded. She looked at Sameh. “Will you come? You don’t have to, but if you would, I’d be grateful?”

Sameh shrugged. “Habibi. Of course.”

“Thank you,” Ellie said to Sameh.  Then she looked at John. “What are you standing there for?” she said to him. “Let’s go.”