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.
Lakshmi Meena didn’t know what to expect as her car pulled up short of the police cordon on the side of the mountain. She parked beside two army lorries and a Jeep and stepped out into the cool night, pulling a scarf over her head. The area beyond the cordon was swarming with uniformed men, one of whom Meena recognised as Dr Abdul Aziz, a senior intelligence officer from Rabat who had left a message on her cell phone half an hour earlier. She had been leaving the bar anglais at the time, wondering what she had said to so upset Marchant. She didn’t like Aziz, disapproved of his methods, his unctuous manner, but he had been the first person on her list of people to meet when she had arrived in Morocco.
Two floodlights had been rigged up on stands, illuminating a patch of rugged terrain where a handful of personnel in forensic boilersuits were searching the ground. Meena talked to a policeman on the edge of the cordon, nodding in the direction of Aziz, who saw her and came over.
‘I got your message,’ she said.
‘Lakshmi, our goddess of wealth,’ Aziz said, smiling. ‘Morocco needs your help.’ He lit a local cigarette as he steered her away from the lights, his hand hovering above her shoulders.
Meena was always surprised by Aziz’s displays of warmth and charm, so at odds with his professional reputation. He had run a black site in Morocco in the aftermath of 9/11, interviewing a steady stream of America’s enemy combatants on behalf of James Spiro, who had dubbed him the Dentist. It was before Meena’s time in the Agency, but she knew enough about Aziz to show respect to a man whose interrogation techniques made the tooth-extractors in Djemaâ el Fna look humane. And Meena hated herself for it, the cheap expedience of her chosen profession.
‘What happened here?’ she asked. ‘The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group? Last I heard, you had them on the back foot.’
Aziz laughed. His teeth were a brilliant white. ‘Since when did they fly Mi-8s?’
‘Who said anything about helicopters?’
‘The Berbers.’ Aziz nodded to a group of goatherds sitting on the ground in a circle, smoking, djellaba hoods up.
‘Oh really?’
‘Our national airspace was violated tonight, and we’d like to know who by.’
‘Forgive me, but isn’t that what your air force is for?’
‘The country’s radar defences were knocked out. It was a sophisticated system. At least that’s what your sales people told us when we bought it from America last year. Our Algerian brothers don’t have the ability to do that.’
‘Not many people do.’
‘The Berbers are saying the helicopter was white.’
‘Any markings?’
‘None.’
Meena had been down in Darfur the previous year, and had seen the same trick pulled with a white Antonov used for a military raid. But the Sudanese government had gone one step further, painting it in UN markings.
She looked at Aziz, who was lost in thought, drawing hard on his cigarette. She remembered the cocktail party in Rabat when he had enquired about her health. A month earlier, she had checked in to hospital for a small operation, something she had kept from even her closest colleagues. Perhaps his question had been a coincidence, but it had disquieted her.
‘Is that why you called me?’
‘There’s something else. An Englishman was seen heading up here this evening.’
Aziz handed Meena a grainy photograph taken from a CCTV camera. It was of the gas-station forecourt on the road out of Marrakech. Someone who could have been Daniel Marchant was in the foreground, arriving on a moped. The date and time was