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Before he did so, however, an idea struck him. He looked up a number on his satellite phone, then sent a Signal text.
Five minutes later he was on an encrypted video conference, but not with Langley. Instead, he found himself looking at the image of a home office in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Vera Ryder, ex-wife of the late Dr. Lars Halverson, was all in black, and when Pace noticed this, he gasped. “The funeral. It was today?”
She nodded. “I just got home from the reception.”
“I am truly sorry to disturb you. I just had some questions.”
She waved it away. “It’s fine. If you have something important to ask me, I’d like to help the fine folks from Homeland Security in any way I can.” She’d worked out that he was CIA, and she was letting him know she knew he wasn’t who he claimed to be.
Pace let it go. “Thank you. I’d like to send you an audio file and have you listen to it. I’m doubtful, but thought you might recognize the speaker.”
She just nodded; Pace thought she looked exhausted, and she’d obviously been crying.
He sent the file, and he watched while she listened to it once, then a second time.
“Any idea who—”
“Wait,” she said, and then she began listening to short snippets of the conversation, both the English and the tiny bit of Spanish Cyrus had spoken at the end. Sometimes just playing a single word or phrase, then stopping it and replaying it.
Pace felt his frustration rise. He had a lot to do, and he thought a ten-minute conversation with Ryder on the off chance she would recognize Cyrus’s voice and identify him would be worth a shot.
But he didn’t have time to watch her piddle with this all afternoon.
“If you want to think about it, maybe I can—”
“This voice…” she said, and Pace stopped talking.
“What about the voice?”
“It’s synthetic.”
“It’s what?”
“It’s an AI-powered voice generator. It’s not a real person.”
“It…it sounds real enough to me.”
“Trust me, I do this for a living. It’s very high-quality, but it’s AI.”
“So…so someone was masking their identity by using this voice generator?”
“Perhaps,” she said, and then she thought a moment. “My theory is easy to prove. There are tens of thousands of synthetic voices available for purchase from dozens and dozens of different countries around the world. They are all out there, on the Internet. They’ll read books or articles to you, do voice-over work for ads, turn technical manuals into audio files. But the Spanish voice…it’s male, the dialect sounds to me like it’s from Spain itself, nowhere else. There can’t be more than a few dozen of that quality.”
Pace was miles out of his depth. “So…I can have my staff listen to every Spanish male voice they can find from a commercial AI generator and try to find a match in order to prove your theory?”
Despite the fact that she was in funeral clothes and looked like she was near physical and emotional collapse, Dr. Ryder laughed a little. “You could do that, I suppose. Or I could just do it now.”
“What do you mean?”
She began typing on her computer. “Artificial intelligence, Mr. Pace, despite its dangers, also offers great benefits. I’ll just have my intelligent agent take this file and compare it to every latest-generation Spanish male synthetic out there…and…” The pause lasted almost twenty seconds, and then Ryder said, “There you have it.” Looking at her screen she said, “This particular voice is called Leonardo, and it’s made by a company called Voice System Solutions. Based in Oakland, California.” She shrugged. “Not that they would have anything to do with Lars’s murder. Someone just purchased or pirated the software from the company.”
“To mask their voice?” he said.
Dr. Ryder shrugged. “I suppose so.”
Pace took a gamble. He told her about Tulum, the LAWs. Contreras’s assertion that the bots were using AI and swarm technology.
Dr. Ryder took it all in, then said, “It’s possible that whoever is using Leonardo is not masking a voice. It’s possible that Leonardo is the Spanish voice assigned to an artificial intelligence agent.”
