“Hey,” she said again, “Quiet,” but by then it was too late.
“We’ll fucking show you…” the man said, and looked around at his friends.
Ellie went forward, five quick steps, and hit him in the face with her hand. She hit with the full momentum of her steps, as hard as she could, and wearing an armored glove, too.
He fell over, and sat on the ground bleeding. Then he started to get up.
“Don’t,” she said, and pointed her submachine gun at him. “Stay there. Don’t move. And don’t say anything else, either. Or I’ll kill you.”
The man blinked, surprised, but stayed where he was, apparently deciding what to do.
He probably wouldn’t move, Ellie thought. This had probably just been his way of coping with feeling frustrated and threatened. She almost understood how he felt, and might have been the same herself, but she’d had to knock him over anyway. His anger was dangerous to her and Sameh. It was infectious. Other people might become angry too, and then they would be badly outnumbered.
She waited, to see what he did, letting him think things over, giving him a chance to quieten down before she did anything else to him. He seemed to see something in her manner. He stayed where he was, sitting on the ground. He only moved enough to wipe the blood from his nose onto his forearm.
“Hold onto it,” Ellie said, meaning his nose. “Pinch it.”
The man just looked at her, and didn’t seem to understand. He didn’t react, but he also wasn’t moving, so she decided to stop worrying about him. To the others, just to be clear, she said, “Keep quiet unless I tell you to speak. Don’t make trouble. Then you might all get through this alive.”
None of them answered, which was approximately what she hoped for.
“All right,” she said. “Now. Who’s in charge?”
There was a stir among the militia. Several of them turned around. Everyone looked over at a body on the ground. A body near the bunker building, which looked as though it had been hit by one of the drone’s rockets.
“Him?” Ellie asked.
A few of the militia said yes.
“Oh,” she said. “Shit.”
This happened sometimes in the MidEast too. During the assault, the village headman got excited and forgot he wasn’t twenty any more.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, who’s next in charge? Who’s supposed to be in charge now?”
No-one answered. No-one moved. Ellie could see why. It might not seem the best time to start volunteering for command.
“Someone has to be in charge,” she said, looking around at the militia. “Have an election. Decide who the favorite is. Do whatever. Otherwise I start shooting people.”
They looked at each other, and seemed slightly disbelieving.
“Quick,” Ellie said, and pointed her sidearm at someone at random.
One of the older men, not the person the gun was aimed at, cleared his throat and said, “You’d really shoot someone for not picking who’s in charge?”
“I’d shoot someone because their face annoyed me,” Ellie said, callously and quite untruthfully. “Pick someone. Now.”
The older man looked at her. “It might as well be me.”
“Good,” she said. “See? Now we’re getting somewhere.”
The man didn’t answer. He seemed quiet, soft-spoken, as if he wasn’t used to raising his voice. Ellie thought about shouting, and the few words this man had spoken. His voice seemed familiar. It sounded like the voice Ellie had heard across the compound earlier, when she had been shouting that the militia should give up.
“Were you talking to me a moment ago?” she asked suddenly.
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you say so?” she said. “Fuck. Okay, you’re in charge. Do what you need to do to make sure of that.”
The man seemed confused. “Do what I need to do?”
“Yeah, whatever you need to do before you take over, deal with it now. I need to talk to you without distractions, so get rid of any problems now, before we start.”
“Problems?” he said, still confused.
“Yeah,” Ellie said. “Rivals. Competitors. The guy who’s always fucked you off and you want to get even with now. All of that. Deal with it all, tell me who I need to shoot and I’ll shoot them, and then we can talk.”
The man kept looking at her, shocked.
She was overdoing it a little, pretending to be a little more heartless and hate-filled than she actually was because she wanted him to think she was truly like that, and be scared of her, and do as he was told. She was pretending, and she thought she could pretend fairly well. She had done this with hajjis often enough before, by calling them hajjis for a start. It seemed to be working again, now, at least well enough that this man was looking at her with dismay, and a kind of resignation. As if he was reconciled to her manner, and just wanted to stop her hurting anyone else, and as if he was not completely unsurprised that she was a debt recovery operator and a monster, both.
“There’s no-one,” he said. “There no-one you need to kill.”
“You’re sure?” she asked. “I can if you’d like. Anyone you’d like me to.”
“No,” he said.
Ellie shrugged. “Whatever you like. As long as you’re in charge.”
The man didn’t answer.
“Are you?” she asked. “In charge?”
“Apparently.”
“Completely in charge? There’s no doubters, no-one else who’s going to make a fuss?”
The man shook his head.
“You need to be completely sure about that,” Ellie said.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Not while you’re here, anyway. Not until after you’re gone.”
Ellie nodded. That would do. She glanced at the bunker building. “Are the women and kids in there?”
Suddenly, the man looked wary.
“Just answer,” Ellie said.
“Yes,” he said, sounding reluctant.
“Do you want them left out of this?”
After a moment, he nodded slowly.
“We can leave them out of this,” Ellie said. “We can do that, but you have to talk to me.”
He just stood there, looking at her.
“What’s your name?” Ellie said.
The man hesitated. “I think I’d rather not tell you.”
“Any name,” she said. “Whatever you like. I just want to be able to call you something.”
He shook his head.
Ellie sighed, and looked upward quickly, at the trigger spot for her e-glasses interface, so the glasses would begin tracking her eye movements. The menu system activated, superimposing text over her field of view. She picked through a few options, blinking to activate each screen, and found the infonet data displays. She stared at the man in front of her until the glasses registered she was looking at him, and then the sensor net made a guess as to who he was based on his height and weight and eye color, on nearby vehicle registration chips, on known associations with this location, and on the wireless-enabled store and credit cards he had in his pocket, which Ellie noticed weren’t all in the same name. She grinned, but didn’t say anything, and waited while the system picked through the data it had, and made a best guess as to who he was.
It superimposed the name next to his face.
“Terry?” she asked.
Terry looked at her for a moment, surprised, and then shrugged. “Yeah.”
“It’s just so I can call you something,” she said. “So we can talk. I don’t care more than that.”
“Fine,” Terry said. “I’m Terry. What do you want?”
“I’m looking for someone,” Ellie said. “And I think he’s been here.”
Terry thought about that, then said, “Who?”
“A boy. A kid. From Shanghai.”
Terry just looked at her, and didn’t react, and that look was enough to tell Ellie everything. Terry wasn’t surprised. A kid from Shanghai wandering around out here was fairly
unusual, but Terry didn’t even bother pretending that Ellie had said something unexpected. More importantly, he also didn’t say that he hadn’t seen anyone who might be a kid from Shanghai, and Ellie thought that if he hadn’t seen the kid, he probably would have told her. There was no reason for him not to. He probably wanted to be unhelpful, and she understood that, but there was being uncooperative, and then there was just being stupid. If Terry didn’t know anything useful then the smart thing to do would be to tell Ellie that, to convince her, so she went away. But he didn’t even try. He just stood there, and didn’t react, and that told Ellie everything she needed to know.
Now she had to decide what to do next.
*
Ellie thought about what to do.
She could hit Terry. Or hit someone else while Terry watched, like his family. Assuming that some of his family were here in the compound with him, which they probably were. Or she could avoid physical violence, and use another kind of coercion instead. She could threaten to have him imprisoned, for instance. It would be quite easy to have him imprisoned. All she needed to do was think up some large, arbitrary expense she’d incurred during the day’s operations and then bill him for it, so that when he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, he would be put in a workhouse to service the debt. And he would be put in a workhouse for non-payment, because she would take his wallet from him and throw it away before she invoiced him, which would make sure he was. And she would tell him what she intended, very clearly, before she did.
She could do those things to him. She could do a lot of things. She could hit people, or put forfeiture notices on his house, or hound him from his job, if he had one. Or she could just hit him. She could threaten Terry with any number of unpleasant things, and that might make him tell her what she needed to know, but it might also make him stubborn.
It might very well make him stubborn.
She had a feeling he was that kind of person, or he wouldn’t be here in the first place. She had a feeling that trying to make Terry do as she wished might go wrong, and that threats of being slapped around or locked up for a few weeks with a false debt claim weren’t especially alarming, not to a Měi-guó debt-resistor like Terry. And that was bad. It meant that she might have to do more than just threaten, and more than just hit people carelessly. She might have to escalate this beyond just pushing him around, and do something worse.
She might have to threaten him with something awful.
That was why she’d been so hateful earlier. It was why she was usually hateful, why she called people nasty things, and didn’t try to stop Sameh shooting at people who just happened to walk past. Seeming cruel, seeming unreasonable, those were useful things to be. It helped, at moments like this, to have a built-up store of fear and uncertainty in the minds of those she spoke to.
If Terry thought Ellie was dangerous, or callous, or even just a casual bigot and biased against debtors, then he might believe she would do something awful more easily than he otherwise would. She needed that, to make her threats believable, mainly so she didn’t have to carry them out. She hoped that by now, with the dead all over the compound, with the drone hovering overhead, with Terry’s people disarmed and the noncombatants in the building right next to her, she could make a credible threat. She could point guns at people, for instance, and say that if he didn’t tell her what she needed to know, right now, then someone died.
And he might believe her. And then she wouldn’t need to kill anyone.
He might believe her, but he might not, and that was the problem. It meant that if she began saying such things and he just shrugged and said he didn’t care, then she might need to go through with it and actually kill someone just to prove that she would. And she didn’t know if she wanted to do that.
She wanted to find some other way. She wanted him just to do as she asked, without everything becoming stubborn and heroic and difficult. She just wanted him to tell her about the missing kid without the need for more killing and violence.
She might still have to kill someone in the end, she supposed, but first she wanted to try just talking.
*
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 she 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 emphasize 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 her 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 it, 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 her 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 her 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 she 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.
The Debt Collectors War Page 21