The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 11

The next morning, Katherine Wyatt landed at Baltimore/Washington International airport and rode in an NSA security SUV the two miles to FANX III, where we met her in a secure conference room. She was seventy-five years old, a bit stooped, with thinning white hair and a mottled face that sagged with loose skin. Her eyes, however, regarded me with a bright intelligence.

From my research, I knew that she had spent thirty years among the Johurá with her husband and three children. Her husband had died ten years earlier, and, of her children, two were now foreign missionaries themselves and one was a pastor somewhere in New England. Mrs. Wyatt agreed to keep confidential anything she might learn from the messages she helped us translate and signed a document to that effect. I’m not sure what we would have done if she had refused.

“Mrs. Wyatt,” Melody said. “Thank you for coming to help us.”

“Please, call me Katherine.”

“Katherine, then. Welcome.”

“Never seen the inside of the NSA,” Katherine said. “It’s a bit of an adventure.”

It still seemed like an adventure to me, too, though I was surprised to hear that opinion from a woman who had spent decades living in the Amazon without the most basic of modern amenities.

Melody and I sat across the table from her. “We have some messages that we intercepted from the Johurá,” Melody said. “Naturally, we’ve had some difficulty in translating them. Are you ready to start? Do you need a drink of water, or some coffee?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “But I haven’t decided yet if I will be translating any messages for you.”

Melody’s eyebrows rose.

I gaped. “We flew you all the way down here!” I said. “What did you think that was for, to give you a tour? This is a matter of national security!”

I stopped my rant when Melody put a hand on my arm. “You are under no obligation,” she said. “But can I ask, what makes you hesitate?”

And why did you agree to come if you weren’t going to help? I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“The Johurá are a complex people, in their own way,” Katherine said. “But they have no understanding of the world outside their villages. They are no threat to the United States. They can barely conceive of it as a place. It’s about as real to them as heaven, and considerably less real than the spirit world. I can only assume that the NSA’s interest in them is misplaced, or else exploitative.” She smiled apologetically.

“I gave the best part of my life to the Johurá. Though I only visit them once a year now, they are probably the closest friends I have. I doubt the language you are intercepting is Johurá at all, since they don’t transmit messages or use phones or computers of any kind, and if they did, they would have no one to talk to. And even then, I wouldn’t translate them for you, since I can see no value in making the private messages of my friends—messages that could have nothing to do with you—available for scrutiny by Americans who would have no context by which to understand them.”

Her diction was precise, her speech carefully structured. Melody smiled warmly. “The language is Johurá,” she said. “There’s little doubt of that. And I agree that the Johurá are unlikely to transmit any messages of their own free will.”

She let the implications of that hang in the quiet room. Katherine’s expression grew fierce. “So you think…”

Melody nodded. “The most likely explanation is that several Johurá are being coerced into using their unique language to pass messages for another group, probably a drug cartel.”

“It’s not so easy as that,” Katherine said. “Their language isn’t easy to translate, and the Johurá don’t know or care about things outside of their experience. Ask a Johurá to pass a message for you, and you might not recognize what came out the other side.”

“There’s one way to find out,” I said, but shut up again when Melody glared at me.

Katherine Wyatt was silent a long time, considering. I was actually starting to wonder if she had fallen asleep or was having some kind of medical crisis, when she said, “All right. Play the messages, and I’ll see what I can do. But if I get the first inkling that you’re playing me, or using this information to harm the tribe, then we’re done.”

Melody showed no expression. She gestured to me to play the first of the intercepted communications. She listened, and I showed her my attempt at a translation.

Katherine laughed. “Harder than it looks, isn’t it?”

I felt a little insulted. I had done pretty well, I thought, given the circumstances.

“Can you help us?” Melody asked.

“Play the message again.”

I played it, and Katherine cocked her head, listening intently. It was a short passage, and when it was done, she whistled it softly to herself in a lower register. “Not bad,” she said. “You had most of the words, just not the sense of it. The first part is a measure of distance. The speaker is saying that the event he’s telling about happened several miles away. It’s a loose term, which can mean all sorts of distances, but they would use it for distances they can’t communicate over—and a Johurá whistle can be heard clearly up to a mile away. It would also be a distance small enough for them to travel during a hunt, since any distance farther than that is just ‘far away’ to them.

“The part you couldn’t decipher is their word for a type of boat. Then the ‘crooked heads’”—here she grinned in amusement again—“is actually the term for foreigner. The word they use for themselves comes from the word for a straight line. They’re the people who have their heads on straight. The other people—the rare people from outside their culture that they sometimes encounter—are a bit crazy, crooked in the head. That’s the root of their word for foreigner.”

“So the real message is something like, ‘Several miles away, some foreigners are coming up the river in a particular kind of boat,’” I said.

“That’s it,” Katherine said.

“Is there any indication of where exactly the foreigners are?” Melody asked. “Which river? What location? Which direction they’re moving? Or even what kind of foreigners?”

“There’s none of that,” Katherine said. “Johurá don’t talk in those kinds of particulars, and their language can’t really carry that information. It’s part of why this doesn’t make any sense.”

“Can you tell anything from the message about the Johurá who sent it?”

Katherine leaned back in her seat. “No Johurá sent this message.”

“What do you mean?” Melody asked.

“The concepts it expresses… no Johurá would speak that way. For instance, the speaker used the phrase ‘xaoói piiboó xaaboópaitahásibiga.’” Here an incredible sound came out of Katherine’s mouth that didn’t sound like a language to me at all. It was the first time I had heard the language spoken instead of whistled, and it sounded like a cross between a cough and bird song. “That’s the second half of the message, about foreigners coming up the river. But the verb construction indicates that the speaker witnessed it happening. Johurá verbs are very complicated, with different forms indicating complex shades of meaning. In this case, however, it’s the wrong verb form, since in the previous portion, the speaker stated that this was happening many miles away. So he couldn’t have witnessed it.”

“Could there be a camera involved?” Melody asked. “If the Johurá was looking at a feed from a camera showing this movement on the river, then he could have witnessed…”

Katherine shook her head before Melody finished speaking. “He wouldn’t see it that way. A camera, if he even recognized what it was, wouldn’t count as witnessing an event. He would say xaaboópatíixísa, witnessed through a spirit, or maybe xaaboópai, stating the coming of foreigners as a fact, without indicating how the knowledge was come by at all.”

“So what are you implying?” I asked. “That a non-native speaker has learned Johurá well enough to whistle it, but not well enough to use the right verb construction?”

She shrugged. “I’m not implying anything. There are maybe twenty non-native people who speak this language at all, and most of them speak only a few words, so they can trade metal tools or whiskey to them. The only people outside of the tribe with this level of facility are myself and my children, and we would not make this mistake any more than a native would. Besides, I would recognize my children’s voices.”

I couldn’t help myself. “But it’s just whistling. How could you recognize their voices?”

Her aging face creased, and she gave me a devastating look, probably the same look of disapproval that had kept her children in line while she was raising them in a jungle village. I recalled that telegraph operators could often recognize each other from the way they tapped out Morse code, and let the matter drop.

“Katherine, this is great information,” Melody said. “If you’re willing, we’d like to go through as many of these as possible and have you translate them. And any insights you can add about unusual usage or shades of meaning would be very welcome.”

Katherine’s face was intent. “I’m trusting you,” she said. “I don’t know if I should, but there’s something wrong here. Something is happening to these people that I don’t understand. Something that shouldn’t be possible. If they’re being used or manipulated, and you can do something about it, then you have my full support.”

With Katherine Wyatt’s help over the following days, we started to put together a picture, though that picture did little to shed light on the mystery of the Johurá. The FARC and the ELN were mixing to an unprecedented degree, sharing resources and jointly occupying territory previously disputed between them. They were also in communication—using the same Johurá whistle code—with Sendero Luminoso, or “Shining Path,” an old Maoist guerrilla faction in Peru deeply involved with the cocaine trade.

This level of collaboration was unprecedented, but not inconceivable. All three groups had decades of revolutionary activity tied originally to communism, and all funded their operations through a stranglehold on local drug trafficking. That they might be working together was a concern, but it made some sense, in the same way the American Mafia might forge a working relationship with Mexican drug cartels.

The mystifying part of it was how the Johurá fit in. These groups all operated on the edges of the Amazon jungle, but that was like saying Los Angeles and Hong Kong both shared an ocean. The sparsely populated Maici River basin, where the Johurá lived, had roughly the land area of France, and it was located in the state of Rondônia in Brazil, nowhere near Colombia or Peru. The guerrilla groups weren’t exactly close to each other either, but they were separated from the Johurá by what would be a two-hour plane flight over a thousand kilometers of the most trackless and unexplored jungle in the world. How was it possible that these terrorist organizations were using such an obscure language to communicate?

Melody’s superiors didn’t care much about how the messages were encoded; they just cared about the political implications of the information we were deciphering. The operation grew bigger than just our little group, as whole divisions of the NSA concerned with South America—not to mention their counterparts in the CIA—added their opinions and analyses to the growing pile of intelligence. We were rapidly sidelined, since the messages were no longer indecipherables. Two linguists began studying Johurá with Katherine Wyatt, and I didn’t see her anymore.

But I couldn’t let the question go. Even as I moved on to other indecipherable messages, my mind worried at it. What set of circumstances could possibly explain how three groups of guerrillas in Colombia and Peru started communicating with a language from one of the most isolated tribes in Brazil? The messages also shared the characteristic of a lack of precision. Distances and places were vague, groups of people unidentified, numbers of any kind almost non-existent. It was driving the analysts crazy. It also implied that the guerrillas had some other means of communicating that type of information, since without it, the messages appeared almost worthless.

Even so, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for kicking off such a furor. We had a front row seat to unfolding world events because of my work. I had complete confidence that the NSA machine would uncover the secret agendas of the guerrillas and know what to do in response. This was the NSA, after all. The largest and most well-funded intelligence agency in the world.

A week later, on the same day, and with no warning despite all our efforts, the presidents of both Colombia and Peru were assassinated.