The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 34

They asked at four more houses, all within a few miles of each other. Each time, Ellie made sure to say it was one of her people missing, not an American. Each time she was polite as she asked. She still learned nothing. No-one had seen the kid, and no-one remembered him especially, and now Ellie was using a voice analyzer and so she knew that all these people were telling the truth.

Ellie didn’t understand that. Someone should remember the kid. Someone ought to have seen something. She didn’t push, though, not yet. She just asked them to think again, and when they did and still didn’t remember, she thanked them and left. She stayed calm. She stayed polite. She didn’t insist, or call anyone a liar. She just talked, and thought, and wondered.

She thought as hard as she could.

After the third house, Ellie took out her tablet, and overlaid her tracker’s movements over the kid’s, and looked at the map that made. She zoomed the map in, and saw how closely his track matched her own, near these houses.

Except that she walked up to the doors.

She realized what had happened.

The kid had been in a car. Now she was looking at the tracker paths, it was obvious. He’d sat in a car, which had visited these houses, but he hadn’t actually got out.

She didn’t know why he’d have done that, but it fit the data she had. It fit, and that meant this search, these house visits, was a complete a waste of time.

Ellie showed Sameh and Joe the map, and explained what she was thinking.

Joe just nodded, and seemed to agree, and Sameh said, “Just like home.”

Sameh meant Afghanistan, and the way high-value target searches mostly ended up like this. It was, Ellie thought. It was exactly like that, and Joe seemed to understand, too. At least, he didn’t bother to ask what Sameh meant.

They went to the fourth house anyway, just to know that they had, even though Ellie wasn’t hopeful that anything would be different. She wasn’t hopeful, and it wasn’t different. The people there hadn’t seen anything useful, either, so Ellie simply said thank you and left.

Then she sat in the SUV and wondered what to do.

She sat there brooding, thinking about the people. She thought about their willingness to answer questions, and that they answered at all, once they knew no-one would be arrested. She thought about how they came to their doors at dawn and spoke to her, just because she asked them too. She had wanted to think that meant something, that it implied innocence. She wanted to think that, but she had a suspicion that wasn’t why these people were being so cooperative.

She thought about TV again. She thought about all the movies she’d ever seen, and all the TV shows she’d watched, year after year.

She thought, and suddenly she knew why these people were being so polite and helpful. She knew, and it wasn’t a very pleasant reason.

This wasn’t Australia, where the police knocked on the door and showed a warrant. This wasn’t the MidEast either, where if someone knocked, you and your neighbors formed a crowd and surrounded them in the street. This was Měi-guó, where authority came with a broken-open door in the night, with masks and automatic weapons and stun grenades and no warning, and where authority had done so for generations.

Ellie should have realized that sooner. It didn’t especially matter, and didn’t change very much about the result today, but she ought to have realized sooner, because she’d been watching this happen in movies all her life.

The way she was going about this wasn’t at all how the Měi-guó authorities would have conducted a search. The people she was waking up, who were getting out of their beds to speak to her, they were willing to talk because they were just glad it was only a conversation.

And that they still had a door, and probably a bed to go back to.

It was horrible, Ellie thought, what this place had made itself into. It ought to be like Australia, and relatively calm and peaceful. It wasn’t, though, it was this, and that it was all so very pointless somehow made it worse.

It was pointless because the MidEast made a kind of horrible sense, in that what it was now had been inflicted on it, created by people like Ellie, acting as they did, for decades. Měi-guó was different, though. At least, Mei-guó ought to have been different, but it wasn’t. Because in Měi-guó, they had chosen this. In Měi-guó they had actually believed the lies governments told them, and had obediently done as they were told, and so, when everything had gone wrong, they had been left with nothing. With less than nothing.

Perhaps people were right, Ellie thought. Perhaps some cultures were just so backwards and broken and credulous they were incapable of anything but debt-ridden poverty.

It almost made Ellie feel miserable. It almost made her feel like she should just give up on people. It almost did, but she forced herself to be sensible instead. To get some distance, and stop feeling sorry for herself. To focus, and be less sympathetic, because in the long run, sympathy would accomplish nothing and it would just upset her. This wasn’t giving spare food to orphan kids in Kabul. This was a problem too big and complicated and profoundly wrong to ever fix. It was too big to fix, and she ought not be feeling the way she was, anyway. Not when she was fairly sure her sympathy was only because these people looked a little bit like her. She didn’t want to behave like that, or be like that, and she didn’t want Sameh to realize she was, either. Not when Sameh had to work, year after year, in that situation. Seeing people who looked like her, hearing people who talked like her, and pushing them around and searching their houses and arresting them, all the same.

Now Ellie had to as well, and suddenly Ellie was having doubts, and getting squeamish, just because the faces she was seeing had changed.

It was slightly pathetic, Ellie thought. It wasn’t her.

She made herself concentrate on the actual operation, and decide what to do next.