“I’m also going to remain here with a small team,” Parais continued. “Not to look at the data, though. We’ve got some additional intel on Lunari.”
“And it’s Lunari that we need to talk about,” the secretary of defense said.
“Indeed,” the President agreed. “Don, you take it.”
“We need those DVDs,” the secretary of defense said, leaning forward. “And it’s been agreed that, yes, Mike, you’ll be the one to secure them. That does remove various problems while effectively dumping them on your shoulders. But the President has managed to convince the prime minister that you have broad enough shoulders.”
“Thanks,” Mike said dryly.
“But we do need the DVDs or… how we would prefer to handle this simply won’t work,” the NSA said.
“Agreed,” Mike said. “And I suppose sending in Delta…”
“Has been discussed and ruled out,” the President said. “We need someone who is highly deniable. Admittedly, there has been—”
“Enough contact that I’m sliding out of that realm,” Mike said with a chuckle. “But I’m the best thing you’ve got.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” the secretary said. “The same goes for the various other black ops groups. When you hit Lunari, there are probably going to be too many traces left behind to totally deny which group did it. Bodies among other things. I’m sure you’d prefer to pull out all of your dead—”
“We try,” Mike said, remembering the Viking funeral.
“But you might not be able to,” the secretary continued. “Ditto on Delta or ANV or ILS. Yes, they’ll go in sterile, but.”
“But,” Mike said. “The problem being that I’m sure I can’t take the bordello with one team and I’m not sure I could do it with the whole Keldara. And if I call in the Families, it leaves us uncovered at home. Bad things can happen when that happens.”
“Which is why a Special Forces team will arrive in Georgia the day after tomorrow to train in-country militias,” the national security advisor said, smiling. “Three teams, actually, with a company of Rangers in augmentation. Do you think that will be enough?”
“Yes,” Mike said. “But they’d better be carefully briefed on Keldara culture.”
“Your Colonel Nielson will remain in place as a liaison,” the secretary said. “He’s being temporarily reactivated so he’ll outrank the team commander. Effectively, he’ll be in command.”
“Oh,” Mike said. “So much for deniability.”
“It’s still there,” the NSA said. “Thin but there. We do this sort of thing all the time with various groups. The Keldara are well liked by the Georgian government.”
“How much do they know about this?” Mike asked.
“Not much,” the NSA said. “And the less the better.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t want them trying to get their hands on the booty,” Mike said, shrugging. “Not that they would. Trust me, the room that this is going in will be wired to destroy everything. And the Keldara will trigger it even if I’m dead.”
“Works for me,” the President said. “But you’re going to have to get the DVDs from Lunari. And we’re going to need the American data.”
“Vanner?” Mike asked.
“I have it here,” Vanner said. “Once we had the basic database set up, it was easy enough to pull out the Americans. Greznya?”
“Here, sir,” the Keldara girl said, pulling a folder out and carrying it over to the President.
“What about Grantham?” the President asked. “We got a brief description from Colonel Pierson, but…”
“Here, sir,” Vanner said, turning to his computer and then stopping. “This is…”
“Just run it, Marine,” the President said. “I understand what we are dealing with.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Vanner said, bringing up the image on the plasma screen over Mike’s head and explaining why it couldn’t be Senator Grantham murdering the girl.
“John?” the President asked, turning to Parais.
“I’d like confirmation from my own analysts,” Parais said, frowning. “But I’m not going to ask for it. But with the original, I will do my own confirmation. Pending that, I have to agree with Mr. Vanner. That is not Senator Grantham.”
“Who is it?” the President asked rhetorically.
“Doing a voice comparison will be hard,” Parais said. “The quality of the data has been damaged by the voice modifier. I’m not sure we could be certain of the identity based upon that data. Even if we ran it against Echelon, we’d probably come up with hundreds, possibly thousands, of hits. The reason being, we’d have to spread the net for the hits. We couldn’t say ‘Give me the person this is’ because it would bring back either ‘no one’ or someone that sounds just like that, which probably wouldn’t mean Grantham because just because it sounds like him to the human ear, doesn’t mean it matches signal…”
“It doesn’t,” Vanner interjected. “We checked. The signal spread is all wrong.”
“So that’s a confirmation that it’s not Grantham,” Parais said, nodding.
“Explain,” the president said.
“The human voice is more than just what we hear,” Greznya said, softly. “There are not only undertones and overtones, things beyond our range of hearing, but frequencies within the sounds we can hear that are cancelled out. When you take all of that and break it down, it creates a very distinct signature, the ‘voice print’ of a person. I actually ran the comparison of this man’s voice against Senator Grantham’s. You can see where the voice has been modified and where it has not. And there has been no modification of the under and over tones. It has only seventy points of congruence to Senator Grantham and three hundred noncongruent points. And additional fifty three were ambiguous and fell outside standard probability.”
“I brought Greznya rather than one of the other girls because she’s my best person at voice recognition,” Vanner said. “She can pick out which Chechen or Russian commanders we’re picking up on the basis of less than a full word.”
“Sort of like when a radio station plays just one bit of a song?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir,” Vanner replied. “And she’s very good at voice analysis as well.”
“This is not Senator Grantham, whoever he is,” Greznya said, softly but firmly. “I have listened to six of his speeches and compared them to this person’s voice, tone and word choice. Admittedly, the subject matter is highly different, but this person uses certain word strings that are not consistent with the senator. And that is ignoring the fact that the voice analysis is not a match.”
“Any idea who he is?” the President asked, just as softly, looking with interest at the girl.
“He is an American,” Layela said. “He naturally has an accent consistent with the northeastern United States. He has some habitual phrases that he may use in common company, notably ‘playing with the big boys’ and ‘gaming the future.’ He is between twenty-five and thirty at a guess based upon his natural tones. He is a nonsmoker. There is no sign of smoking degradation in his voice, however there is slight age degradation. I would say that he is college educated or at least uses large words frequently. More than that I cannot tell.”
“That’s a bit,” Parais said, nodding. “We’ll look at it as well.”
“Carefully,” the secretary of defense said. “Very carefully. And you’re going to need to bring the FBI in on it.”
“That, unfortunately, is an absolute,” the President sighed. “Okay, Mike, you don’t do this for free. What’s the cost on Lunari?”
“I’m also not a mercenary, Mr. President,” Mike said after a moment’s thought. “I do what I do and if there’s a reward I collect it. The question I’ve been asking all along is ‘why go to Lunari?’ I know why I did the other things I did; Lunari is a bit more nebulous. Clear a senator? Not sure I care enough to lose a single Keldara. Make sure that a Brit Foreign Office brahmin isn’t being blackmailed? Ditto. Money has never been the reason I do what I do and you know it.”