The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 24

“I came back,” Joe said. “And kept working. Doing fixed-point patrols for the border authority, mostly. Then a couple of years ago they cancelled cross-border travel to cut down on workhouse escapes. So now I’m stuck here.”

“You couldn’t get out?” Ellie said. It was fairly common for people like them to have two or three or ten different legal identities.

“I didn’t try,” Joe said.

“We could get you out easily enough.”

“But not my father. He’s debt-bound to his house. He can’t leave without paying out the bank.”

“Oh,” Ellie said. “Yes, of course.”

It wasn’t an uncommon situation. Even people in Australia and China ended up trapped in that way, the ones who’d taken mortgages with marginal lenders, and then had one of the intermittent housing bubbles burst and wipe out the value of their equity. Once a house was worth less than what was owed on it, the resident was stuck. If they wanted to relocate they had very few choices. They could pay the lender the difference and sell, which was usually unaffordable, or they could sell anyway, becoming a defaulting debtor, and then try to hide from both the lender and the purchaser of the soon-to-be repossessed house, which rarely worked, or they could stay in the house, and make their payments month by month, and hope that in thirty or fifty years they got free of the lender. It happened everywhere, and was the cost of cheap lending. It would probably have happened to Ellie eventually, if she hadn’t ended up in the life she had instead.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Joe, meaning it.

“It’s fine,” Joe said. “It’s life. I do here what I’d be doing there, anyway.”

Ellie nodded, thinking. It was a good story, a believable story, and it was reassuring to have some idea why he had ended up here. It made him more trustworthy, which was why she had asked.

It was exactly the story she’d tell if she was Joe, and trying to be deceitful.

After a moment, she tapped her comm. “Whoever’s there,” she said. “Do you have the guide’s personnel file open?”

“Yes ma’am,” a voice in the control room said.

“Was any of what he just told me not true?”

“No ma’am.”

Ellie glanced at Sameh, who nodded slightly. She hadn’t seen anything wrong, either.

So what Joe had said fit his records, and had sounded true to the analyser software as well. So either he was a good liar, good enough to beat the kind of software a tablet could run, or he wasn’t lying at all.

He might be a good liar, Ellie thought, and he might have paid someone to insert false data into the company records, but that was all starting to seem very complicated, and increasingly unlikely. It seemed like too much trouble to go to, just so a smuggling group or anti-debt militia to insert one of their own into Ellie’s team. It wasn’t very likely, Ellie thought, unless her mission was already compromised, and if it was, if they were compromised, then the company was leaking from a far higher place than she could ever hope to prevent. And worse, thinking that way led to worry and indecision, and got nothing useful done. She made herself stop. She wasn’t planning around leaks. She was assuming there weren’t any, and she and Sameh unnoticed, lost on the bustle and noise of debt-recovery and collections operations that would be going on all week here. She had checked two channels independently, the records and the truth of Joe’s words, and two independent checks out to be enough.

Ellie looked at Joe, trying to decide whether to trust him.

She was still hesitating, which made her pause. Her hesitation meant she had some doubt in the back of her mind. It might just be ordinary distrust. She always had trouble trusting hired locals. It seemed to her that they ought all be infiltrators, enemy operators, only sneaking into her good books so they could turn rogue and hurt her. She assumed that, because she didn’t understand why anyone would work against their own people, even though she’d spent her entire career alongside people who did.

She looked at Joe, thinking. She stared at him while she did, on the off-chance her stare suddenly got him all guilty, and his face changed or something. It didn’t. He just stood there, looking back at her, waiting, and that helped convince her too.

She was starting to accept Joe, but she still wasn’t quite ready to trust him just yet.