Andy McNab - Deep Black

I went back to the bench with wet milk stains and onion skin on my knees. Still no obvious movement in the apartment. It was nine thirty. I got my cell out, and Jerry's card.

At that moment, they both appeared at the window. Renee leaned forward and smiled, presumably checking the carrycot. When she turned to Jerry, the smile evaporated. They seemed to be in mid-argument. Maybe Renee had told Jerry about our meeting. I hit the cell keys.

Three rings and Renee picked up.

'Hi, it's Nick. Is Jerry there?'

She looked taken aback. 'I'll put him on.'

She handed him the phone.

'Hey…' It was his happy voice.

'Listen, I just want to say it was really great seeing you and the family today. I will think about the trip, OK?'

'That's great news. I'll meet you in London?'

'Hold up, I haven't said I'm going yet. I'll give you a call in the morning. I've got one or two things to sort out.'

'No problem. I'll be in all tomorrow. I'll wait by the phone. Good things, Nick, these are good things.'

'One question.'

'Sure, Nick, anything.'

'How are you so sure your man's in Baghdad? How do you know what he's up to?'

There was the smallest hesitation. 'It's like, I have a friend, a source, I guess. He's on one of the nationals. I can't give you his name… If anyone knew… You know how it is. But he is very definitely on our team, Nick. He'll try to help us once we get there.'

'Fair one. Later.' I closed the phone down but kept my eyes on the flat. He was smiling, and so, soon, was Renee. They kissed and hugged.

Jerry went over and picked up Chloe, held her in the air and flew her about. Then he brought her down towards his face and blew on her stomach, just like I used to do to Kelly when she was little.

I sat there for a while, just watching them do family stuff, and then I went back to what I laughingly called home to learn more about my new employer.

Hot water splashed over my body, and I lathered myself from head to foot for the first time in weeks. Judging by the colour of the stuff that was filling the shower cubicle, it was a wonder I'd been let on the Metro. Ezra deserved a medal for making it through a whole session without reaching for the smelling-salts.

With yet another mug of monkey at my elbow, I sat at the PC with a towel round me, hair drying, face freshly shaven.

The Deep Web is a vast store of searchable databases that are publicly accessible, but for technical reasons not indexed by major search engines. Google or Lycos can tell you what the page might be about, but cannot access the content.

When I was shown how to access the Deep Web, the instructor told me searching on the internet was a bit like dragging a net across the surface of an ocean. A great deal may be caught in it, but there are still whole trenchloads of information lurking deep on the ocean floor.

The intelligence community has used BrightPlanet's DQM (deep query manager) for years to identify, retrieve, classify and organize both deep and surface content. Its information store was five hundred times larger than that of the world wide web, according to the expert on late-night cable TV – 500 billion individual documents compared to the one billion of the surface web. There are more than two hundred thousand deep-web sites. Sixty of the largest contain more than forty times the information of the entire surface web.

Even search engines with the largest number of web pages indexed, such as Google or Northern Light, each index no more than sixteen per cent of the surface web. Most internet searchers are therefore only scanning one of the three thousand pages available. Or, to put it another way, once I'd logged on to brightplanet.com I had a long night ahead. Three hours later, after exploring databases that, among other things, catalogued all of Jerry's published work, I checked my new Hotmail box. Both sets of results were in. I printed them and cross-checked each result against the other.

It seemed that Jeral Abdul al-Hadi had moved round quite a bit in the last ten years. I had eleven addresses in front of me, complete with telephone numbers, as well as the names and telephone numbers of his previous neighbours. If the address was an apartment, I'd been given names and numbers for most of the block.

Marriage records showed that Jerry had married Renee in Buffalo in July 2002. The bride's maiden name was Metter.

I phoned a couple of the numbers at random. After apologizing for calling so late, I told them I was trying to get Jerry but his phone seemed to be out of order. It was an emergency, could they go get him? Very pissed off ex-neighbours told me Jerry had moved away. I did my idiot bit, which came very naturally, and moved on.

Jerry checked out. I wasn't too sure if it was good or bad news; I supposed I'd decide when I got to Baghdad.

What about Nuhanovic? Google threw up only a few links. I picked one which took me to a site that published translations of pieces from Pakistani newspapers, talking about the Coke boycott.

It seemed the journalist liked thirty-five-year-old Hasan Nuhanovic, proudly endorsing him as one of the Muslim world's most progressive and revolutionary thinkers. The Pakistani rumour mill had it that Nuhanovic was in the country, wanting to teach them a little US history. In 1766, the Americans had discovered a political weapon without which the revolution might not have been successful: the consumer boycott.

Even before America was a nation, I was told, it was already a society of consumers, two and a half million strong, scattered along eighteen hundred miles of eastern coastline. But the colonists had little in common besides a weakness for what Samuel Adams called the baubles of Britain.

In 1765, the Stamp Act had imposed a duty on papers used in everyday business and legal transactions. In retaliation, merchants in at least nine towns voted to refuse all British imports. Benjamin Franklin was summoned to London, where Parliament demanded that his people paid the taxes. Franklin reminded the House that his people were huge consumers of British goods, but this lucrative spending habit should not be taken for granted: the Americans could either produce anything of necessity themselves, or quite simply do without. A month later, the Stamp Act was repealed, and trade in British goods continued to thrive.

Just two years later, the British had forgotten their lesson. Parliament imposed the Townsend Revenue Act, taxing tea, glass, paper, anything essential. 'Franklin's threat became a reality,' the piece said. 'The boycott became a public movement. Just as important, it allowed women, small-town dwellers and the poor to become political activists. In Boston in 1770, hundreds of women signed petitions saying that they wouldn't use tea, and of course they eventually had a big party with a few boxes of the stuff out in the harbour.'

Cities issued detailed lists of all items that were taboo. Voluntary associations formed in citizens' support groups to make sure nobody was buying the boycotted goods, and attacking those who did. The Brits were being attacked where it hurt, in their pockets. America was becoming united against the mother country, and it very soon became the fashion not to buy British. It didn't matter if American goods were inferior; it didn't even matter if they didn't exist. It was a change of mindset.

And this, apparently, was exactly what Hasan Nuhanovic was trying to achieve: to encourage people to retake control of their own destinies from those who thought they had the right to dictate to other cultures.

That was it. Never any recent picture of him, never any interviews. No wonder he was camera-shy. As well as being a target for every religious fundamentalist and political extremist going, it seemed he hadn't exactly endeared himself to the powerful multinationals either. In a piece in Newsweek, one reporter who'd spent several months failing to get an interview had written: 'You could say it was like getting blood out of a stone – if only you could get past the legions of gatekeepers and through the impenetrable smokescreen of security. Compared with Hasan Nuhanovic, Osama bin Laden's a media tart.'