Games Traitors Play

13

Paul Myers wouldn’t have bothered to listen to the audio one more time if it hadn’t been for Daniel Marchant. He knew his old friend had spent the past three months in Marrakech largely because of him. His line manager at GCHQ had dismissed the theory that Dhar had texted Marchant from Morocco, but Myers had thought otherwise. Like Marchant, he didn’t believe Dhar would hang around the Af-Pak region after the assassination attempt. It was too obvious, despite the mountainous terrain and the volatile political climate, both of which made it difficult for the West to search. He could never prove that Marchant’s text had been sent by Dhar, but he had run his own checks on some dodgy proxy networks, and would gladly bet his (unused) gym membership that it had originated in Morocco. And if it was a coincidence that the lyric in the text was by a singer who shared her surname with a North African mountain range, he found it a reassuring one.

So it was guilt more than anything that made him put his headphones back on, adjust the fluorescent band at the base of his ponytail and play the US audio file again. He owed it to Marchant to prove that the Americans were wrong about Dhar. He sat back and yawned, scratching at his slack stomach through his fleece jacket as he looked around the empty office.

His desk, littered with chocolate-bar wrappers and filled-in sudokus from various broadsheet newspapers, was in the inner ring of the GCHQ complex, dubbed the Doughnut because of its circular shape. The Street, a glass-roofed circular corridor, ran around the entire building, separating the inner from the outer circles. Its purpose was to encourage separate departments to share their data. No one on the building’s three floors was more than five minutes’ walk from anyone else, and face-to-face meetings in softly furnished break-out areas were the way forward.

At least, that was the idea. In truth, people kept to themselves. Myers used the Street solely for walking to the Ritazza cafés and deli bars that dotted its orbital route. The workforce at GCHQ, with its mathematicians, cryptanalysts, linguists, librarians and IT engineers, was the most intelligent in the Civil Service, but it was also the most socially dysfunctional, steeped in a long tradition of strictly-need-to-know that dated back to Bletchley Park and its campus of separate huts. Myers wouldn’t have had it any other way.

He looked out onto the secure landscaped gardens in the middle of the building, hidden below which was GCHQ’s vast computer hall. It was down there, in the depths of the basement, that the mathematicians worked, and that the ‘Cheltenham express’, an electric train, shuttled back and forth day and night, carrying files along a track beneath the Street. To the right of Myers’ window was a decked area, where people could walk out from the canteen. Beyond it was a large expanse of lawn that had been nicknamed ‘the grassy knoll’ and was meant for blue-sky meetings. Myers liked to sit there in the summer and take his lunch.

The garden was dark and empty now, its edges bathed in a pale, energy-efficient light spilling out from the offices around it. Myers used to work as an intelligence analyst in the Gulf Region, on the opposite side of the Doughnut, his desk looking out at one of the two pagodas that had been built in the garden for smokers, but he had asked for a transfer to the subcontinent after Leila had died. He had carried a hopeless torch for her, and still hadn’t come to terms with her betrayal, let alone her death. Listening to intercepts in Farsi had proved too painful.

The voice in the headphones was definitely Dhar’s. His American colleagues had run every test there was, subjecting it to a level of spectrographic analysis that had even met with Myers’ jaundiced approval. But what had caught his attention was the lack of data about the background noise. All ears had been tuned to the voice.

Myers listened to the Urdu, noting instinctively that it was a second, possibly third, language, but his eyes were on the computer screen in front of him and the digital sound waves that were rolling across it to the rhythm of Dhar’s speech. When the Urdu stopped, Myers eased forward in his seat and scrutinised the data, watching the waves moving along the bottom of his screen until the segment ended. He moved the cursor back to where the Urdu had stopped and played the final part again, his tired eyes blinking. This time he magnified the wave imagery, boosting the background noise. At the end of the clip, he did the same again, except that he only replayed the final eighth of a second, slowing it down to a deep, haunting drawl.

After repeating the process several more times, he was listening to fragments of sound, microseconds inaudible to the human ear. And then he found it. Moving more quickly now, he copied and pasted the clip and dragged it across to an adjacent screen, where he had loaded his own spectrographic software, much to his IT supervisor’s annoyance. He played the clip and sat back, taking off his headphones, cracking the joints of his sweaty fingers. The ‘spectral waterfall’ on the screen in front of him was beautiful, a series of rippling columns of colour; but the acoustic structure was one of intense pain. At the very end of the second call made by Salim Dhar, there was a sound that Myers had not expected to hear: the opening notes of a human scream.