Deep Black Read online

  The door into the hallway was open. There was no movement. I minced round the rear of the building and found the unlit admin area, where the entire apartment block’s garbage was stored in big dumpsters, awaiting collection.

  I put on the rubber gloves and switched on the torch. It had been years since I’d done any dumpster diving. I always got out of one of these things smelling like shit, sometimes real shit, but it was worth it for what you could learn about a target if you were prepared to delve among the banana peel, coffee grounds and the odd dead cat in a bin-liner. Most people don’t give much thought to the letters, phone bills, credit-card statements, medical prescription bottles and even workplace memos they discard.

  The first thing I looked for was some cardboard boxes. I pulled them out and set them aside. If anyone challenged me, I’d say that a friend was moving and I was just looking for boxes to help him pack. If they persisted, I’d come clean and say I’d thrown my wedding ring in the trash in the heat of the moment, but now I’d patched things up and wanted it back before my wife found out. With luck, they’d even help me look.

  People like me weren’t the only ones with their heads in trash cans. Police departments around the country routinely trawled through garbage, and every kind of criminal from Mafia dons to petty embezzlers had had their convictions based, at least in part, on evidence gathered from their rubbish. Intelligence agencies had been doing it for years. After the Iranian revolution in ’79, the new government had bands of students gluing together all the documents shredded by the previous lot. It took them four years.

  I did a quick sift first, checking all see-through bags for disposable nappies or other baby items. Then I moved to black plastic ones, opening them one by one. An hour later, I found a bag that had come from Jerry and Renee’s apartment. There was a letter from a clinic, saying that the whole family were now registered, and their medical cards were enclosed.

  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 Chloë, 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.

  22

  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 h
abit 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.’

  I clicked another link that sang the praises of new cola brands, owned by Muslims, and offering a real alternative for people concerned about the practices of some major Western multinationals who directly or indirectly supported Muslim oppression. Once again, street talk was that Nuhanovic had slipped into Pakistan last year, to explain that Coca-Cola represented American capitalism and that by boycotting it consumers were sending a powerful signal: that the exploitation of Muslims could not continue unchecked. But the Pakistan government wasn’t too impressed. Their population was about half that of the United States – a huge market. Two per cent of the country’s revenue came from tax on Coca-Cola sales.

  A spokeswoman for the London-based Islamic Human Rights Association said the war on terrorism had made all American brands a focus for resentment, and buying alternative brands made the Muslim community feel better. ‘It makes us feel like we can do something,’ she said. ‘Coca-Cola has become a big symbol of America. It’s a tangible symbol at a time when there is increasing unhappiness about US foreign policy.’

  In response, Coca-Cola said that an unofficial boycott of US products in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel had really fucked with its bottom line in the region. Zam Zam Cola, the Iranian drink introduced after that country’s Islamic revolution, had huge sales growth a few years ago when a prominent Muslim cleric ruled that Coke and Pepsi were ‘unIslamic ’.

  Zam Zam was now exporting to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, shipping more than ten million bottles in the last four months of 2002.

  Qibla Cola – named after the direction the faithful face when praying – had plans to expand into the Middle East, Africa, southern Asia and the Far East. I couldn’t help smiling at the prospect of adverts asking us to take the Zam Zam taste test.

  23

  Thursday, 9 October

  The forty-seater Royal Jordanian turboprop had hit turbulence several times during the hour-and-a-half flight. I had my head against the window, watching the blur of the prop. It was no surprise that most of the world’s major religions were born in the desert. There was fuck-all else to do.

  Each time the aircraft bucked, it drew gasps from passengers who were new to the game. They probably thought we were being downed by a SAM 7. The not-so-funny thing was that they might soon be right.

  I glanced over at Jerry in the aisle seat. He was busy sorting out his camera bits and pieces, so I turned back and stared out of the window again. Below me, in the emptiness of the Western Desert, I saw the strip of tarmac that connected Jordan to Baghdad. It looked as remote as a motorway across Mars.

  Jerry had met me off the plane at Heathrow. After a three-hour wait, we were on our way to Jordan. The Sunday Telegraph wanted not just the picture but six thousand words on how Nuhanovic had been found, and what he had to say for himself.

  We’d had to hang around in the Jordanian capital since Monday evening. There was only one flight into Baghdad each morning and every man and his dog wanted to be on it.

  The only way of getting in earlier was chancing it on the hell-for-leather roads. There were three routes in: from Kuwait to the south, Jordan to the west, or Turkey to the north. At the moment, myth had it that Turkey was best, but it was still a nightmare. They’d been nicknamed the Ali Baba roads for a reason. Every gangster in the region knew that journalists carried big wads of US dollars. They held them up, then hosed them down. And if the hijackers didn’t get you, the nervous young American soldiers would. They didn’t like people overtaking their convoys.

  Even if we had been robbed, it would still have been cheaper than flying. It was costing us over a thousand dollars each, but even pre-booking didn’t guarantee a seat. We’d paid for our Tuesday flight, but still had to turn up every day and try to blag our way on board. There was a list of passengers for each departure, but that really didn’t matter. You just had to line up and take your chances with the women on the desk. Each morning, I would point to our names on the manifest, and each time she would say something like, ‘Yes, you are on the flight, but you can’t go today.’ Jerry did the translating, but it always just sounded like ‘Fuck off’ to me.

  It had still been dark when we left our minging hotel every morning to start the day’s bribery. We’d even tried to bluff our way on to the daily UN flight. It didn’t seem very full. They’d pulled out of Baghdad after a bomb had killed their representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and a shedful of others.

  Jerry had been going apeshit because he wanted time to sort himself out on the ground before Nuhanovic arrived, but now he was coming in on the same day. I leaned over to him, and nodded surreptitiously towards a bunch of heavily bearded characters at the back of the cabin. ‘You sure he isn’t on this flight?’ That got a smile out of him. He’d been contacting his DC source every day, but there was still no int.

  Most of our other fellow travellers seemed to be overweight businessmen, sweating buckets in their compulsory Middle East business suits – khaki fishing waistcoats, pockets stuffed with digital cameras so they could snap away and tell war stories afterwards. I’d heard a few German and French voices among them, but mostly they were American. Whatever the nationality, they all carried their laptops and other business stuff in macho, brand new daysacks.

  A few rows in front of us was a guy called Rob Newman. At least, I thought it was him. I hadn’t seen him since the early nineties, when we were both in B squadron of the SAS. I’d got out and worked for the Firm. It was only later that I’d heard he’d commanded the patrol that dug in the LTD caches for me in Bosnia. Rob wasn’t a new boy to the Middle East either, or Baghdad for that matter. We’d both been into the city during the first Gulf War, fucking about trying to cut communication lines. He’d spent what felt like a lifetime sitting on a sand dune, just like me. If it wasn’t training some Arab special-forces group, it was trying to kill them. ‘Maintaining the UK’s interests overseas’, it used to be called, but it had probably had a shiny and very cuddly PR makeover under New Labour. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him. After al
l, every man and his dog with a mortgage to pay off would have headed straight to Iraq.

  I’d seen Rob at Amman airport every day, doing the same as us, getting fucked off the flight. But while Jerry was foaming at the mouth, Rob never lost it. He was deep and consistent: he always thought about things before gobbing off. His was always the voice of reason, and it was directly linked to a brain the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.

  The other constant with him was his dress sense. His uniform was blue button-down shirt, straining a little round the gut these days, chinos, Caterpillar boots, and a fuck-off Seiko diver’s watch the size of a Big Mac.

  I didn’t know if he’d seen me; we certainly hadn’t had eye to eye. It was one of the unwritten rules. Even if you recognized each other, you wouldn’t go up and say hello. One or both of you might be on a job; you might be putting him in the shit if his name wasn’t Rob Newman today.

  It would have been good to say hello, though.

  24

  The back of Rob’s head was still covered by a mop of wavy brown hair that stuck out in all directions. I was happy to see a bit of grey at the sides, and that he’d put on a bit of lard – not that I could talk after a few months on the toasted cheese and Branston diet. He was taller than me, maybe six one or two, but I didn’t mind because he also had the world’s biggest nose. By the time he was sixty it was going to be bulbous and red, with pores the size of craters. He came from the Midlands somewhere and had a voice like a midnight radio DJ.

  He was with a guy in his mid-thirties, with thick black hair and very pale skin whose slight build reminded me of the younger Nuhanovic. He hadn’t been hanging around in the Middle East for long, that was for sure. In the aisle seat of the row behind them was the sky marshal, a tall Jordanian with severely lacquered hair and a big bulge under his cream cotton jacket. Next row back were two Iraqi women who hadn’t stopped gobbing off at each other, and their two mates across the aisle, at a hundred miles an hour since checking in. Then there was us: both bored, knackered and gagging for something to drink.