Deep Black

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 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.’

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.