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looked like a tight-fitting, waffle-style sports T-shirt. The sides were hooked together, and Nuri had to hold his breath to undo them. Pain shot through his entire chest as he pulled the vest apart. The spots where the bullets had hit were dark purple and black. Bruises in the shape of spiderwebs ran out from them. His nausea returned. He stood over the toilet, dry heaving for four or five minutes. He ran a warm bath, laying with some difficulty against the side of the tub as the water slowly filled it up.
    The bath didn’t do much to relieve the pain. The beer in the minifridge, Stella, made only slightly more headway.
    The bruises were nothing. The real pain came from the fact that he had permanently lost Luo, and would now have to start from scratch on the Jasmine Project.
     
    J ASMINE WAS ONE OF THE CODE NAMES USED BY A RING OF smugglers who worked primarily in Africa. As these things went, they were relatively small fish. Their main wares were flowers—they got them in and out of different countries cheaply, sometimes legitimately, but more often without applying for the proper inspections or paying government fees, thus allowing them to be sold more cheaply. Low-priority smuggling of this nature was common, especially following the collapse of the Free Trade agreements at the start of the decade.
    But if you could smuggle flowers, you could easily smuggle drugs. If you could smuggle drugs, you could easily smuggle weapons.
    Actually, the flowers tended to be relatively lucrative, especially when the risks for everything else were figured in. But most of the organizations involved in smuggling didn’t have risk analysts on the boards of directors.
    Jasmine had attracted the CIA’s attention after it sold machine guns to a notoriously abusive warlord in Somalia. The Agency didn’t mind the sale—the warlord was fighting against an even more notoriously abusive warlord. But it raised Jasmine’s profile in the Agency, which soon realized that thenetwork—actually more a loose organization of contacts with a variety of benefactors—was very active in the Sudan. Still, Nuri might never have been assigned to check into the network had it not acquired a variety of finely milled aluminum tubes and small machine parts some months before.
    Aluminum tubes might have any number of uses, depending on their exact dimensions. In this case, the tubes happened to be of a size and shape suited for the construction of medium-range missiles—a particularly potent weapon in the Sudan, since they would allow rebels to fire against urban centers from a considerable distance.
    The tubes could also be used to construct machines useful in extracting uranium isotopes from “normal” uranium. That seemed unlikely, given that they were bound for the Sudan, but just in case…Nuri was given the assignment to find out what he could about Jasmine.
    He’d spent months wandering in and out of eastern and northern Africa, getting the lay of the land. He had help from the NSA, which provided him with daily summaries of intercepts and would give him transcriptions on the hour if necessary. And he had an array of “appliances” to help—most importantly, a biological satellite tracking system that could locate special tags practically anywhere on earth, and the Massively Parallel Integrated Decision Complex, a network of interconnected computers and data interfaces that constantly supplied him information via a set of earphones and a small control unit that looked like a fourth generation Apple Nano. Called the MY-PID by the scientists, Nuri referred to the system as the Voice, since it primarily communicated through a human language interface.
    But mostly Nuri was on his own. He didn’t mind. He’d always been a bit of a loner, not antisocial, but willing to rely on his own wits and abilities. The only child of expatriate parents who spent most of their adult lives moving through exotic countries, he was used to that.
    By the time Nuri