The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 79

Field interrogation had once been explained to Ellie as being like economics. There were scarcities and needs and calculations almost of supply and demand. Calculations like how many people knew a given piece of information.

If the person being interrogated was alone, or was the only one who knew the information being sought, then that person was valuable because the information they knew was scarce, and so the interrogator had to be careful with that person’s life. Then, there was a balance between hurting or scaring someone enough to learn their secrets, but not so much as to risk killing them by mistake and thereby learning nothing. If there was information scarcity in an interrogation, then there was also a balance, and the person being interrogated could hope that some care would be taken with their life.

But only if there was information scarcity. If there was no scarcity, if many people knew the secret, then anything might be done during the interrogation. People’s lives could be risked carelessly.

Ellie remembered having this explained to her, long ago, in a seminar about counter-insurgency operations. The most terrifying thing a field interrogator could do, the instructor had said, was to a demonstrate a willingness to kill the people being interrogated. Kill one, if there were several, and then the rest knew any threats being made weren’t a bluff. Then they knew that any hope they had of not being killed themselves was gone, and the assumption of not being killed accidentally, too. In effect, killing one person told the rest that they couldn’t count on the scarcity of information to protect them. Not until the last one, anyway. Not until information was scarce again.

That was the theory as Ellie been taught it, and it applied here as much as anywhere else.

Here, in the compound with the militia, the information Ellie needed wasn’t scarce. It was widely available. Almost anyone in the compound could tell her whether the kid had been there, and probably give her some idea where he’d gone when he left, and who with, and how long ago. That meant she needed no particular person alive, not even Terry. It also meant, since scarcity wasn’t a factor, that Ellie could be as brutal as she needed to be. She could kill half the people in the compound, and still have the other half to interrogate. She could be careless with lives, if she had to be, and in fact being careless might be useful as a way to emphasise how badly she wanted her information, and how far she was willing to go. It ought to make the militia think carefully about how important their secrets were.

More importantly, since Ellie could afford to be brutal if she had to be, that meant someone was probably going to talk to her in the end. Someone would tell Ellie what she wanted to know, because someone always did. There was courage and willpower and all the rest, but none of that mattered, not really. No-one could hold out forever, or even very long, especially if Ellie called in a doctor and began using meds as well as pain and threats. No-one could hold out, and everyone knew that, so it was simply a matter of Ellie hurting and threatening and killing until someone talked. Therefore, for any particular militia member, suffering to avoid talking was probably a waste of time, because the odds were that someone else, someone weaker, was going to talk instead. Someone else talking made the first person’s suffering inconsequential, and in a complicated mathematical way, that applied equally to all the militia. No-one knew who would talk, but someone would, and because someone would, no-one else should suffer because of it, because they couldn’t count on everyone else to do the same thing. That was modern interrogation theory. Once it was clear that people were caught, and facing a determined interrogator, no-one should bother being a hero. The militia might as well just tell Ellie what she wanted to know, went the theory, and save everyone a lot of unpleasantness.

Ellie knew all that. She knew how this worked. She would talk in this situation herself, if she had been captured. She understood the underlying rationality of this, and was completely sure the best thing for the militia to do was talk to her.

Now she just needed Terry to be sure of it too.

And that was the problem, really. The simplest and quickest way to make Terry understand his situation was for Ellie just to kill someone, or kill a few people, so he knew that she was willing to do it. That was part of the theory, too. This first conversation was a test, in an odd kind of way. It was a test of Ellie’s will, and the militia’s importance to her. If she shot a few people, then she proved how far she was willing to go, and then Terry ought to give up and not be stubborn.

That was the theory. That was how Ellie had been taught this worked. If Ellie shot a few people, then she wouldn’t need to shoot all the people, and then they could all sit down and talk quite amicably.

It was rational, and she understood what she supposed to do, but she felt very reluctant to actually do it. She’d already killed a lot of people today, so more killing wasn’t really proving anything much, and now that the rush of combat was wearing off, and the battle meds in Ellie’s system had stopped spiking her adrenaline and suppressing her cortisol and empathy, she was becoming a little tired of killing.

She was becoming a little nauseated by herself.

She was used to that. It was fairly common after combat, especially after unfair combat like this had been, and like fighting hajjis usually was. She was used to it, and knew the biochemical reason it was happening, but all the same, she didn’t really feel like more killing.

Instead, she wanted to just explain all the theory to Terry, explain how bad his situation was, how bad all the militia members’ situations were, and how far Ellie would go if she needed to. She wanted to make him to understand the theory as clearly as she understood it, so he would realize there was no point being difficult, and getting a lot of people hurt, and would just do as she wanted him to.

She wanted him to before she killed anyone else, just to prove a theoretical point.

She hoped she could make him understand as clearly with words as she could with a gun. And at least, she thought, she might as well try.

She didn’t have anything much to lose.