Free The Assassin by Andrew Britton Page B

come close to matching America’s bloated intelligence budget, it was the British. Some of the specific innovations were new to her, but she knew the process inside and out; after all, it was Bell Labs, her first employer, that had pioneered the use of voice-recognition technology back in the 1940s. Things had come a long way since then. Significant advances over the past few decades had done away with the cumbersome magnetic tape and photographic paper of the analog spectrograph. Digital signal processing, or DSP, had since taken its place, though in some ways, the new equipment was almost as tedious to use.
    The British computer engineer caught her curiosity. “Have you guys replaced all that junk your contractors came up with in the sixties?” she asked, with a smile. Peterson knew about Naomi’s years before the Agency.
    “I couldn’t really tell you,” Kharmai replied honestly. “We obviously don’t have anything as good over here, but I’m not sure about Langley. Last time I checked, they had a contract with Motorola in the works, but I’m not sure if they ever bought the gear.”
    “If your Admin Directorate had anything to do with it, they probably decided to look for something cheaper. Our budget people are the same way; they’d take the cost of this stuff out of our salaries if they thought they could get away with it.”
    Naomi smiled in agreement. Liz Peterson was the “man in mind” she’d mentioned to Emmett Mills the previous day. She had first met Peterson at an embassy function shortly after arriving in-country, and they had hit it off immediately, despite the fact that they were technically competitors. On the weekends they frequently met for drinks at the Dorchester Hotel, and while they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, both women habitually took those opportunities to dig for a little information. They both knew it was part of the job, and they took it all in stride. Naomi was well aware, for instance, that her access to Whitehall’s database had been approved by somebody much higher on the pay scale than Liz Peterson, despite the informal nature of her request. She also knew that whatever they managed to turn up would soon land on the prime minister’s desk, most likely within an hour of discovery. Sharing information with one’s allies was the cost of doing business, but that wasn’t much of a price to pay, especially when they managed to come up with something interesting.
    Peterson sat up in her seat as the numbers paused on the monitor. Fixing her pale blue eyes on the screen, she brushed a strand of blond hair out of her face and brought up the relevant information.
    “You have something?”
    “Maybe,” Peterson replied, a hint of excitement coming through. She leaned forward and traced the amplitude waves with her index finger. “Just going by the visual, that’s a… sixteen-point match.”
    “Good enough for a probable,” Naomi murmured. After purchasing their first analog spectrographs in the late 1970s, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology had adopted, for lack of a better system, the forensic standards used by U.S. law enforcement at the time. A “probable” identification was assigned to any match greater than fifteen but less than twenty points on a given spectrogram. In other words, there was an 80 percent chance that the voiceprint in the MoD’s database matched the voice found on the tape in al-Umari’s Knightsbridge home.
    Peterson was still trailing her finger along the screen. On the monitor, the voiceprint resembled the cross section of a series of waves. “See here,” she said, pointing to a large splotch of red in the left-hand corner of the graph. “That’s a hard c , like in the word ‘car.’” She moved over to the right-hand side of the graph, where the red was much less pronounced. “And this is a soft t , like in ‘booth.’ The fricatives you see here are really good news for us.”
    “Because of the language