Free Deep Black by Andy McNab Page B

and was told to check my email box in two hours. I then forked out an extra $19.95 for the marital-records service, suggesting they started with Buffalo.
    I then ran a name check for Renee al-Hadi but drew a blank. Some states had direct online marriage databases. They all got the al-Hadi question as I waited for the paid information to come through, including Nevada. But they hadn’t run away to Las Vegas and got married by a Sikh Elvis impersonator at a drive-thru house of love. Shame, it sounded like fun. I’d just have to wait for the New York state records to come through, and take it from there.
    I logged on to anybirthday.com and entered Chloë al-Hadi. There was only one, and it gave her date of birth as 9 May 2003.
    If I could, I wanted to find something linking Jerry to the DC address. Telephone databases were most likely to be up to date; I went to any-who.com and keyed in the number on his card. Sure enough, the reverse number lookup gave me the new apartment.
    Next Google search was for ‘dating + background check’. I got another search company, this time one that helped run checks on prospective dates, maybe people you’d met through the internet. It looked like it was just as healthy to be paranoid in the dating game as it was in my ex-line of work. I wanted to cover all the angles, and if the results didn’t correlate, I’d need to know the reason why.
    I now had nothing to do but wait while they did their stuff and got back to me. I went into the kitchen and got more tea and toasted cheese under way. This was basic stuff I was doing, at the very bottom of the intelligence food chain, but it felt good to be doing something familiar at last. It beat going the best of three falls with my psyche in Ezra’s office, or watching others do the same thing on Gerald Rivera , that was for sure.
    It was only when I smelled the cheese burning that I started to wonder what the fuck I was doing. It wasn’t as if I was going with him, was it? Was I just checking him out because I simply didn’t trust anyone any more?

20
    With a mug of fresh monkey tea in front of me, I went back online. Google took me to a site called classmates.com. I registered as Donald Duck and tried the same for a Hotmail address. But it seemed a million and one others had had the idea first, so I made up some other shit and gained instant free access to the site. There seemed to be thirty-three schools in Lackawanna, from Baker Victory High to Wison Elementary. Guessing Jerry’s date of birth as 1971, I went through them all systematically, searching from kindergartens in 1975 to high schools in 1990.
    Within twenty minutes, I had a positive hit. Jeral al-Hadi had attended Victory Academy, and the school site gave a list of twenty-three classmates, complete with email addresses. They all wanted to get together and show their new baby photos and tell everyone how successful they were. If necessary, I could either email them or go back to anywho for their phone numbers.
    Next, I dipped into the sex-offenders register for New York and neighbouring states, an online service to comply with ‘Megan’s Law’. Jerry had a clean sheet. Did his story about moving quite recently to DC stack up? And when exactly had he moved? Why did this all matter anyway? I knew the answer, of course, but was trying to avoid it, hoping I’d find something that would make me not want to go with him.
    I sat and thought a bit. I was sure I’d seen a VCR in the apartment. I went to infospace.com and hit the link called ‘near an address’. I keyed in ‘video store’, then Jerry’s address. Video Stock was the nearest video rental place, just 0.2 miles away. I went back to Google and entered ‘Video Stock + DC’. There were twenty-four branches. I picked up the phone and dialled the one that looked furthest away.
    A young guy answered. ‘Video Stock, this is Phil, how may I help you?’
    I gave him my best-mate voice. ‘Yeah, hi, Phil – listen, somebody in