The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 52

They drove up the road behind the militia compound, to the clump of trees they had found earlier. When they reached it, Joe slowed down, and they all looked around. There didn’t seem to be anybody else nearby, so Ellie got out of the SUV to open the gate.

The gate was stiff, and rusted shut, and she had to go back to the SUV for anti-rust spray, and use that on the latch and hinges, then thump the latch to make it move, and kick the whole gate quite hard several times too, to finally get it to open. It was a good sign, she supposed. Nobody else had been through here in a while. It was a good sign, but it was also a little worrying because she was taking so long, and someone might come along and see her. She glanced up and down the road as she kicked, but nobody was nearby. Finally, the gate began to swing, and she pushed it open, and let Joe drove through. She closed it again behind them, and smeared dirt onto the latch and hinges so it wasn’t as obvious it had just been opened, and then she got back into the SUV.

She got in, and glanced at Joe. He was still being quiet, and still seemed in an odd mood, so she left him alone.

They drove across the field, and parked in among the trees. The trees were fairly dense, and quite scrubby, with lots of dense undergrowth that was tricky to walk through, but which also concealed them fairly well. Ellie left a sensor pack camera at the SUV, and had put another at the gate, so they could check with a glance at a tablet that no-one was creeping up behind them.

They walked a little way through the trees, picking their way around the thickest shrubs, until they reached the edge of the patch of forest, where there was a view out over the fields towards the militia compound.

They sat there, hidden just inside the foliage, and watched the militia compound through binoculars. They watched, but they couldn’t see a great deal. They were a long way away, far enough they could really only expect to see vague movement and vehicles, but not the detail of what the movement was.

Ellie studied the fields between her and the compound. It was open grass, with a couple of fences, and gates which looked like the one they had just opened. They could probably drive if they needed to, she decided, weaving their way through the gates. Or they could walk. She peered at the back fence of the compound for a while, and although she couldn’t see it completely clearly, it seemed to be three or four metres high and closed-mesh wire, which would be tricky to climb and trickier to cut. And very obvious if they did either.

That changed things a little, Ellie thought. Going in the front gate might be better after all, if they decided to go in at all.

She sat, and watched, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Everything was quiet.

Now they were here, Ellie wasn’t sure what to do.

She’d already had all the non-intrusive data collection done that was possible. She’d had the operations centre run their sweeps and send the results to her tablet. She had heat scans and millimetre radar scans and topographic modelling of historic satellite data showing patterns of construction and moving vehicles and people coming and going over time. Based on an analysis of those patterns, she also had estimates of the numbers of people currently inside, and also, from phone triangulations and voiceprints, the details of their probable identities and biographic data pulled from intelligence and debtor files. She had all of that information, but none of it was helping.

She still didn’t know if the kid was actually inside.

She could do more. She could gather more intel. She could have drones fly over to conduct narrowband sweeps, or she could slip in closer tonight herself and leave a sensor net around the compound, watching it. She could even have a drone drop hundreds of tiny sensor capsules all over the compound and see what she learned that way. She could do all sorts of clever near-magical things to see what was going on inside, but any of those was a risk. Once their prying became more intrusive, if someone inside the compound noticed it, then the militia would immediately know they were being watched, and that could end very badly.

In a lot of ways this was better, just quietly observing from a distance, close enough to react if anything happened, but far enough off to be hidden.

It was what she and Sameh had done often enough before, other places, and it still felt like the right thing to do here. It felt like the right, but it might not be, Ellie thought. Since all they were really doing was sitting outside the militia compound, watching, and learning nothing.

And since sitting there wasn’t actually helping them find the kid.