The actual content of this weird conversation was even more mysterious. Half of it was in coded words which clearly didn’t match whatever the other content was. The expert analysts who had reviewed it were of the opinion that she was giving information about a medical problem, but that in itself was probably code for something else.
The second call was even shorter. Again, she had pre-recorded it, and it seemed like some sort of update. The man thanked her and, even across the passage of time and so many miles, you could hear the relief in his voice. He spoke for six uninterrupted seconds then rang off.
The people in the Oval Office were totally perplexed. What had started with so much promise a few minutes before had now turned into a labyrinth of problems.
The chief-of-staff glanced again at the report which had been emailed over and told them that Echelon had searched its entire database for the last six years to see if the sat-phone had been used to make or receive any other calls. There was nothing – just the two phone calls, like single atoms drifting in cyberspace; virtually incomprehensible.
And yet, even in the mess of code and voices borrowed from news programmes there were clues. Four words, mistakenly spoken by the woman at one point, were in Arabic, and the man cut her off harshly in the same language – admonishing her for using it. So they were Arabs: or maybe that was a rehearsed, deliberate mistake to make anybody who was listening leap to a certain – and wrong – conclusion.
There was another clue: in the background at the Turkish end of the conversation, the thrum of roaring traffic almost drowned out the sound of muzak or a radio station or something. But not quite – there was what sounded like music, and the analysts figured it had been transmitted down the phone line as the woman played her recording into the mouthpiece. What it was, however, they couldn’t tell. Their report said they would have to drill down for weeks to try to get an answer from what they had recovered.
Normally, such background noise wouldn’t have mattered – Echelon would have been able to identify the location of the phone box within moments. But the Turkish phone system was far from normal. Whoever at Echelon had designed the software that worked as a thief at a country’s regional telephone hubs didn’t count on shoddy workmanship, illegal connections, undocumented repairs, mysterious rewiring to avoid being charged, epidemic corruption and constant technical failures. All that Echelon could do was narrow the phone box down to the centre of a small city: somewhere inside a five-mile radius a woman had received two phone calls, their report said, as traffic passed by and some sort of music played in the background.
‘What about voice recognition?’ the president asked, focusing on Echelon’s most highly classified capability. His voice sounded even more fatigued than he looked.
‘The woman didn’t speak long enough in one stretch to get a sample,’ the chief-of-staff said, looking further down the report. He turned to the three secretaries, knowing they had never been admitted into Echelon’s innermost secrets …
‘The system needs at least six seconds. It then compares elements of a voice to over two hundred million other voices – terrorists, criminals, guerillas – from information gathered from databases throughout the world,’ he said, warming to the subject. He’d always loved technology.
‘But that’s just the start. The real game-changer is it can break down each vowel and sound into a digital—’
‘That’s enough,’ Whisperer interrupted, his eyes telling the chief-of-staff that one more word and, under the provisions of the National Security Act, he would be allowed to get up and throttle him.
‘What about the man?’ he asked. ‘Did they get six seconds of him talking?’
‘Yeah, they got a good enough sample from him,’ the chief-of-staff said, still smarting from being slapped down by the Director of National Intelligence. ‘But there was no match – there wasn’t even a subset of voices he was close to – not in English or Arabic. It says here: “completely unknown to any intelligence or law-enforcement database”.’
The development scared Whisperer deeply. He didn’t tell the president or the others, but the one thing which no intelligence agency in the world could deal with was a cleanskin. Where did you start with a person who had no history, no form, no record? Whisperer had never met one in his life – not a genuine one – and he had never wanted to.
The others noticed the anxiety in his sombre face and, in the short, awkward silence that followed, they realized that their luck wasn’t coming back.
The president was the first to pull himself together and exercise the leadership they needed. He told them that, for all their hours of frustration and cratered hope, one thing remained true: there was a woman in southern Turkey who knew the man’s identity and had spoken to him. She had given him information which, it seemed, was very important. Why else would he, in the middle of testing a virus he had synthesized – a remarkable achievement – have gone to the trouble of calling her? Not once, but twice. Anybody smart enough to engineer a deadly virus must have known there was a risk somebody would be listening. Why did he do it? What was so important? More importantly – who was the woman?