The Dept Collector's Obsession

Chapter 4: Numbers Don't Lie

Kirill sat at his desk with the Voss file open in front of him and read it for the third time that morning.

He always reviewed a debt personally before deciding what to do with the person attached to it. Most of the time it was simple. An amount, a date, a name. He had read a hundred files like this one, maybe more, and they all looked the same after a while.

This one did not.

He brought out the original loan agreement first. Small amount. Reasonable terms, for the kind of lending his people did, which was not the kind you found in a bank brochure but wasn't predatory garbage either. He does not run things that way. A debt that could not be paid back was worthless to him. He wanted people to pay, not drown.

Then he pulled up the current balance.

The number was wrong.

Not wrong in the sense of a mistake. Wrong in the sense that someone had built it that way on purpose. The interest had doubled twice in places it should have been once. There were fees added that were not part of the original terms at all, small ones, easy to miss if you were not looking closely, doubled one on top of another until they added up to something real.

Kirill leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen.

He did not authorize this. He remembered the original terms on the Voss loan. He did approved it himself months ago, back when it was just another small file crossing his desk. Nothing about what he had approved matched what he was looking at now.

He pulled the transaction log and started reading line by line.

Most of it matched the original loan. Then, about six weeks in, the pattern changed. New fees appeared. The interest calculation shifted to a formula he did not recognize from his own system, something closer to what you do see designed to trap someone instead of collect from them cleanly.

That was not how he did business. Never had been. If you wanted someone dead, you do not need paperwork for that. If you wanted them to pay, you give them terms they could actually meet. This was neither. This was built to trap a man who could never get out, no matter how hard he tried.

Which meant somebody inside his own business had rewritten the terms without telling him.

He thought about who had access. Not many people did. The system that tracked individual loans was small, deliberately so, run by a short list of people he trusted enough to touch numbers that mattered. A leak in that list was a problem bigger than one bad debt.

He picked up his phone and called Dmitri.

"Yeah," Dmitri said, picking up on the second ring.

"Come to my study."

"On my way."

Kirill looked back to the file while he waited, checking the numbers again, hoping he did find some simple explanation, a clear error, a system mistake, anything that did not mean what he already suspected it meant. He did not find one. The changes were too clean, too deliberate, spaced out over weeks in a way that looked designed to avoid being caught.

Dmitri knocked once and opened the door.

"You look like you found something you did not want to find," Dmitri said, sitting down at the other side of the desk.

"The Voss debt," Kirill said, turning the screen so Dmitri could see it. "Look at the interest calculation starting here." He pointed. "Compare it to the original terms."

Dmitri leaned in and studied the amount for a long moment. His face went from casual to focused fast.

"That is not our formula," he said.

"No, it is not."

"Who touched this?"

"That is what I am asking you," Kirill said. "The system only lets a small amount of people edit an active loan file. I need to know exactly who logged in and changed these terms, and I need to know when."

Dmitri brought out his phone and started typing, bringing up the access logs accordingly. Kirill watched him work, running out of patience in a way he normally did not. He did not like surprises. He especially did not like surprises hiding inside numbers, because numbers were the one thing in his world that were supposed to behave.

"Got it," Dmitri said after a minute. He looked at the screen a second longer than made sense for a simple name.

"Well?"

Dmitri looked up. "Access log shows the last person to touch that file before the changes started was Yulia."

Kirill sat back. Yulia had worked the accounts for almost four years. Quiet, careful, never made mistakes that he knew of. She was not the kind of person he did expect to skim off a small personal loan, not when there were bigger accounts she could have touched if greed was the reason.

"Yulia does not handle loans this small," Kirill said. "She works the shipping side. Why would she even have access to a file like this."

"That is the part that is bothering me too," Dmitri said. "She should not have had access at all. Not through the normal channels."

"So either she went looking for a reason to touch a file that had nothing to do with her job," Kirill said slowly, "or someone gave her access she was not supposed to have."

"Or someone used her login without her knowing," Dmitri said. “It would not be the first time somebody borrowed a password they shouldn't have."

Kirill turned that over in his head. Three options, and none of them were good. A trusted employee stealing quietly from a debt too small to be worth the risk. Someone inside the company is intentionally, and carefully finding access through her account to hide their own tracks. Or a breach he had not caught yet, someone outside touching things they had no business touching, using Yulia as cover.

He thought about the girl currently sitting in the east wing of his house, the collateral for a debt that had been planed on purpose by someone who was not supposed to have anything to do with it.

Small file. Small amount. Somebody had gone through a lot of trouble over something that, on paper, should not have mattered to anyone.

That bothered him more than the money did.

"Talk to Yulia," Kirill said. "Quietly. I do not want her threatened, and I do not want to hear this from anyone outside this room until we know what actually happened."

"And if she says she did not do it?"

"Then we have a bigger problem than a planed loan," Kirill said, "and I want to know who is been inside my systems before they touch anything else."

Dmitri nodded and stood, already bringing his phone back out. He paused at the door.

"You want me to tell Elena the amount is wrong? Might make things easier with her if she knows the amount is wrong."

Kirill considered it for a second.

"Not yet," he said. "Not until I know why it is wrong. Telling her half a story is worse than telling her nothing right now."

Dmitri left. Kirill sat alone with the file still open on his screen, the numbers no longer looking like a simple problem to solve, more like the first loose thread in something a lot bigger, something somebody had planned carefully enough that it had taken him three times just to notice it was there at all.

He did not like that. He did not like it at all.