Authors: Terry Hayes
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 Muğla,’ he replied.
‘The name of the town is Bodrum.’
Chapter Fifty
WHISPERER DIDN’T SHOWER, didn’t eat, didn’t rest. He called ahead from his car to have every current government file on southern Turkey downloaded and on his office computer by the time he got there.
He wanted to know as much about the area before he even thought about which agency – let alone which operative – he was going to tap as the Pathfinder.
Hence, immediately after arriving from the White House, he spent the morning shut inside his large office with the blinds drawn and the door closed, hunched over his screen.
He had just finished a State Department analysis of Turkey’s current political situation – another ten pages of fellatio, he thought to himself – and picked up a thin file which had been sent to the US
Embassy in Ankara, the country’s capital.
It was from a homicide detective in the NYPD, and it was asking for help in discovering the names
of all female US citizens who had applied for Turkish visas in the last six months. Whisperer didn’t know it, but Ben Bradley had come up with the idea – a good idea too – that somebody who had a Turkish phone number and an expensive calendar featuring spectacular Roman ruins might be thinking of going there.
Whisperer saw that it concerned some murder at a hotel called the Eastside Inn – not the sort of place he would be staying anytime soon to judge by the grainy photos attached to the police crime report – and was about to lay it aside.
Then he stopped. The eye for detail that he had developed as a young man when analysing spy photos of Soviet military installations had never left him. By habit, he always looked deep into the background of any shot, and now he was looking at a man barely visible in the shadows of a murder
scene.
Whisperer knew him. Even in the photo he seemed to be a man apart, just watching – as he had probably spent half his life doing.
Whisperer stared at the image of me for a long time, thinking, then pressed a button on his desk,
summoning his special assistant. A man in his late twenties, well tailored and ambitious, entered almost immediately.
‘I want you to find a man,’ Whisperer told him. ‘I don’t know what name he uses now, but for a long time he called himself Scott Murdoch.’
The special assistant looked at the photo Whisperer pushed across the desk, the face in the background carefully circled. ‘Who is he?’ he asked.
‘Years back he was known as the Rider of the Blue. He was probably the best intelligence agent there’s ever been.’
The special assistant smiled. ‘I thought that was you.’
‘So did I,’ Whisperer replied, ‘until I met him.’
Chapter Fifty-one
THE CROWD HAD started to arrive early, streaming into the largest auditorium on the campus of New York University. Frankly, I didn’t think the room would be big enough to hold them all. It was the first day of Ben Bradley’s long-planned symposium – the Davos Forum for investigators and the technicians who worked in the pit-lane on their behalf.
They came from twenty different countries – even a two-man delegation from the Bosnian police
department who didn’t speak English but had convinced someone in authority that they should attend.
By all accounts, they were having a whale of a time in New York and, over early-morning coffee, they communicated to Bradley their support for making it an annual event. They suggested holding
the next one in Vegas.
After Bradley’s welcoming address, in which he recounted some of his own experiences on 9/11,
including the plight of the guy in the wheelchair – conveniently omitting the part about how he had
saved him – he was given a large round of applause. That was the cue for him to introduce a hitherto unknown colleague who had assisted Jude Garrett on so many of his investigations. In other words, I
was on.
Thanks to Battleboi and the databases he had manipulated, I was now Peter Campbell again. When I
had visited him in Old Japan to ask for help with the new identity, I asked if he could make the new identity convincing, given that we only had limited time.
He nodded. ‘We’ve got one huge advantage – people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace – computers don’t lie, but liars can compute.’
I laughed. ‘Is that why you’re so good – you’re a gold-plated liar?’
‘In a way. I guess I believe in alternative realities. Look around, I live in one. I suppose they’re one big lie.
‘I’ve never said this to anyone,’ he continued, ‘but in a fair fight I’m better than your buddies at the FBI or any of those secret-agency guys.
‘You see, to them, alternative realities or cyberspace is just a job. Because I’m big and unattractive, it’s different – I don’t like the real world much.’ He indicated the racks of hard drives. ‘This is my life.’
‘Funny,’ I replied. ‘I’ve never thought of you as big or unattractive. I’ve always thought of you as Japanese.’