Chapter Forty-nine

TWO PHONE CALLS. The first pull from echelon had produced two satellite calls and both of them fitted the search criteria better than anyone could have expected.

Made three days apart, both of them were slam-dunk in the designated time frame and, although there had been a fair amount of atmospheric interference – probably another storm moving through the Hindu Kush or that damned wind blowing all the way to China – the NSA analysts who had handled the high-priority search for the White House were certain they had been made within a few miles of the ruined village.

It was quite possible that they were made from within the village, but that level of precision would have to wait for the IBM Roadrunners to try to determine the exact coordinates by filtering out the interference.

In addition, the two people on the line – the man in the Hindu Kush and a woman at a public phone box in southern Turkey – were both speaking English, although it wasn’t their native tongue.

The president and Whisperer, listening to the chief-of-staff’s report, looked at one another, and their expression said what the three Cabinet secretaries were thinking: could it get any better than this?

Then their luck ran out.

The two people on the phone might have been using English, but it didn’t help much. On the first call the man said very little; it was as if he was listening to a report. While the woman did nearly all of the talking, she was very smart – she had pre-recorded it, probably on a cellphone. What she had to say was culled from the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and a host of other English-speaking TV news services. Although she interrupted her recording a couple of times and offered what seemed to be additional information, it was impossible to get an idea of her age, level of education or anything else that FBI profilers might have been able to use.

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?

‘So … we go to Turkey, ’ he said in conclusion. ‘How? ’

Of course, the secretaries of defense, homeland and state – the Gang of Three was what Whisperer had started calling them in his head – were all for sending in the Fifth Army and the Mediterranean Fleet and storming the beaches. A hundred thousand agents wouldn’t be enough for what they had in mind. The president calmed them down.

‘We’ve caught a glimpse of somebody, ’ he said. ‘If we charge in, if we flood the zone, she’ll take fright and head for Syria, Saudi, Yemen – you name it – some hole we might never be able to dig her out of. ’

He had read about the mistake George Bush had made when they were chasing Osama bin Laden and he had flooded the zone in Tora Bora. The number of people on the ground and the depth of agency infighting ended up undermining the operation completely. Eventually, they got him by good old-fashioned intelligence work. ‘What do you say, Whisperer? ’

‘On the money. The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used, ’ he said, ready to go to war with the Gang of Three if he had to. ‘It’s the type of work covert agents do, the best of ’em anyway. We send in a Pathfinder and, if he’s good enough, and our luck comes back, he’ll find out enough to light the way for the rest of us. ’

The Gang of Three said nothing, probably still dreaming of massive bombing runs and the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. ‘Who do we send? ’ the president asked.

‘I don’t know, ’ Whisperer replied, and that was why the president respected him so much: he was one of the few people in Washington willing to admit he didn’t know something. ‘I’ll come back to you. ’

The same thought ran through all their heads. One man, that was all, a Pathfinder alone in a strange country. Not a job for a man afraid of cracking, for someone who had never learned to dance.

The six people in the Oval Office decided there was little more they could do while they waited for Whisperer. The man himself stood up and deftly scooped up the copy of the Echelon report the chief-of-staff had put on the coffee table – he didn’t want that left lying around. As the keepers of the great secret headed for the door, one last thought occurred to the president and he called out to Whisperer: ‘Where exactly in Turkey are we talking about? ’

Whisperer leafed through the pages of Echelon’s report. ‘A province called Muğ la, ’ he replied. ‘The name of the town is Bodrum. ’