“I just saw it on CNN last night.”
“My brother was on that tourist boat,” I said. “He was one of the survivors.”
Scaggs gave a long whistle. “Wow,” he said. “I’m glad he’s okay.”
But I wasn’t listening to him. The sound of Scaggs’s whistle was still playing through my mind. A long, even sound, rising and then falling. I jumped out of my seat, banging my leg against the table and almost spilling my lemonade. “That’s it!” I said.
Scaggs was gaping at me. “Sorry,” I said. “Gotta go.”
I took off toward the hallway at a jog, leaving my tray and an astonished Scaggs behind me. I reached my desk and crashed into my seat. I mistyped my password twice in my haste, finally taking a deep breath and getting it right the third time.
I brought up the indecipherable. It had to be. I selected several of the phrases with rising and falling letters and graphed them as numbers. They were 8-bit words, but they weren’t ASCII-encoded at all. They were musical notes.
I was certain I was right, but even so, it took a lot of time to prove it. An hour later, I was in the NSA library, hunting through their vast linguistics section. It was my first time there, and it was overwhelming, an incredible collection of books on anything an NSA analyst might possibly need to research, including perhaps every book, doctoral thesis, and academic paper written on the study of languages in the world. After a long hunt, and with the help of one of the library staff, I made it back to my desk with a book called Aspectos da Fonologia do Johurá, written in Portuguese by an American linguist with an organization called the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
An hour later, I had it. I leaned back in my chair and shouted “Eureka!” as loud as I could. I’d like to say I was just caught up in the moment, but really, I’ve just always wanted to say that. Watching Shaunessy Brennan jump two inches out of her seat made it all worthwhile.
“What?” she practically snarled.
“I cracked it,” I said.
Andrew and Shaunessy and a few of the others gathered around my computer, and I showed them what I’d found. “The message isn’t encrypted at all,” I said. “Not really. It’s an encoding of the sound of a whistle.”
“A whistle,” Shaunessy said.
“There’s a tiny people group living along a tributary of the Amazon called the Johurá,” I said. “Maybe three, four hundred people tops, who speak this language that’s so weird and difficult to learn that it was decades after they were first discovered before anyone cracked it. It only has three vowels and eight consonants—the fewest phonemes of any language in the world. It’s tonal, like Chinese, only more so. The meaning in the language is communicated through tones more than the phonemes themselves. The word for ‘one’ and the word for ‘two’ are the same word, only with a different tone. It’s all like that.”
“And there’s a written form of this language?” Andrew said. “You’re saying somebody’s using it to pass messages like the Navajo Code Talkers?”
“Not quite,” I said. “One implication of such a tonal language is that it can be whistled. You can actually communicate effectively without the phonemes at all, just by whistling the tones. A native speaker can infer what the phonemes should be by context. That’s what this message is. Johurá whistle talk.”
“So?” Shaunessy said. “What does it say?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t have enough information. I picked out a few words, enough to be sure I was on the right track, but there’s no dictionary.”
“Does anybody at the NSA speak the language?”
I chuckled. “Nobody speaks this language. A few hundred Johurá along the Maici River, a missionary family that lives with them, and two linguists. Two. In the world.”
Andrew shook his head and grinned. “Then I guess we’re going to need to find one of them.”
CHAPTER 10
Later that evening, when most of the team had gone home for the night, Melody found me and dropped a carton of Kung Pao chicken on my desk. “Brains need food,” she said.
The hot chicken smelled delicious, and my stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since my abandoned lunch with Captain Scaggs. She handed me a plastic fork, and I dug in, while she sat in Shaunessy’s chair and ate from a carton of her own.
“Andrew tells me you cracked one of the Ligados messages,” she said.
There was that word again. “Is that who it was from?” I asked. “The Ligados?”
She nodded. “We’ve been inundated with indecipherables from them. It’s starting to be a big deal. They’re growing in influence, taking hostages in Colombia and Brazil and demanding responses from their governments. They seem to have a lot of connections to existing groups—FARC, ELN—but we can’t pin down who they are. We’re intercepting all their messages, but we can’t read them. The DIRNSA wants to know what they’re saying.” The DIRNSA was the Director of the NSA, which she pronounced like a single word, dernza. “So do we know what the message says yet?”
“No. I did manage to turn it into sound, though.”
I hit play on my computer, and a series of whistles played out over the speakers. “I had to guess at the actual pitches,” I said. “I figured a 2000 hertz midpoint and a 100 hertz step between each unique value. It might not be accurate, but it seemed reasonable… ish.”
“Nice,” she said. “If we can find someone who speaks the language, that might be enough for them.”
“The problem is, almost nobody speaks this language. It’s not taught in any school; there’s no alphabet or grammar for it that I’ve been able to track down. Though my resources are pretty much the library and Google, so if you’ve got any better ideas, let me know.”
“One step ahead of you,” Melody said. She lobbed a thick manila envelope at me, which I caught. The label on the front read Summer Institute of Linguistics.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Research on the Johurá from SIL International. They’re stationed in Dallas, so I had an agent from our San Antonio office drive there and fax me everything they had.”
I was astonished. San Antonio to Dallas was a five-hour drive. Some poor junior agent had spent all day on the road just to acquire this document and secure fax it to us. Deciphering these messages was apparently more important than I realized. I was also starting to see how “the Major” might have earned her nickname.
“I skimmed what they sent,” she said. “There are acoustical graphs of Johurá whistle language covering a range of their vocabulary. Maybe not enough to understand everything, but hopefully something. Have you sorted through any of the other South American indecipherables to see if they use the same code?”
I was embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to me.
“Well,” she said. “We’ve got our work cut out for us tonight.”
After an hour of working with her, I thought Melody Muniz was possibly the most brilliant person I had ever met. Her field of expertise was in cognitive computing, which, from what I could gather, meant using insights from the way the human brain was organized to invent new ways of processing data with computers. It was a cross between neurology and computer science, and her explanations of the methods she was using left my mind spinning. It occurred to me that her group might retain its funding not just because of the occasional message it managed to decipher, but because of the groundbreaking research being done by some of its team members.
She put together a program to recognize the basic pattern of the whistle message and set it churning through the thousands of indecipherables to find the ones that matched.