The clerk saw the hesitation as one more bad sign, and might have called his supervisor or even decided to claim they were full had not a large family come through the doors. Just in from Modena for a visit with an ailing grandmother, there were three children under six in the party, and the small lobby suddenly felt as if it were under assault. The clerk processed Nuri’s credit card, then promised to have his passport ready within the hour.

“Your bags?”

“The airline lost them,” said Nuri. “I’ll deal with it later.”

Upstairs, he pulled off his top shirt and undid the vest, which 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.

JASMINE 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 the network—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 reached the Sudan, the aluminum tubes had been delivered. Jasmine had not had a similar deal since. In fact, the network seemed to have fallen into a bit of a lull, without any large deals for some months, if the NSA intercepts were to be believed. But he’d managed to track down Luo in Turkey two weeks before, following a credit card trail. He’d missed him in Istanbul, but found him in Alexandria, where he was able to have him “tagged” by an unsuspecting masseuse working in an unlicensed bath.

At least the sign claimed it was a bath.

His surveillance and NSA intercepts made it clear that Luo was expecting some sort of big payoff from a deal being cooked up in Italy.

But now all that work had been flushed by a woman with a gun.

NURI POPPED THE TOP ON ANOTHER BEER, SIPPED THE OVERFLOW on the top, then sat down to talk to his CIA supervisor. The Voice network had a separate communications channel, but he used his sat phone; Jonathon Reid wasn’t typically on the Voice network.

“Hey, Bossman,” Nuri said to Reid, “how’s it shaking?”

“Poorly,” said Reid. “Was that your subject who died at the Coliseum?”

“Word gets around fast.”

“It’s on the news.”

Nuri reached over and flipped on the television. It was, in fact, on the news. The reporters didn’t know the dead man’s name, let alone the fact that he was an arms smuggler. But they did have his picture, courtesy of several tourists. They also had a reasonable description of the alleged shooter: Nuri Lupo.

“I didn’t shoot him,” said Nuri, watching the homemade video on the screen. The legend at the bottom said it had been posted on YouTube.

“That’s good to know,” said Reid. “I was beginning to lose faith.”

Jonathon Reid’s official title as special assistant to the Deputy Director Operations, CIA, covered a myriad of responsibilities and not a few sins. Reid was a throwback in many ways, an old-school line officer who had been exiled from the Agency following a very bad case of “red butt” two decades before.

“Red butt” was a term veteran officers used to describe how someone in the field reacted when someone in the bureaucracy told them how to do their job. Someone with red butt typically began telling that person what he or she could do with their advice. The general result was termination of some sort—usually by reassignment rather than firing, though the latter was not completely unheard of. A red-butt-induced reassignment was both mind-numbing and career ending. Usually it resulted in something that made counting paper clips in Fredonia look exciting, and the usual result was early retirement.

Reid had ended up in Fredonia, though he didn’t count paper clips there. The small town in upstate New York had an outpost of the New York State university system. Granted a job as a permanent visiting professor—red butt or not, the Agency took care of its own—Reid had used his position to work behind the scenes, writing and lecturing on national security and technology issues, and quietly advising a number of politicians and government officials. One of his main themes was leveraging technology to help men and women in the field do their jobs more effectively. A year ago he’d been brought back by the new CIA director.

Reid had actually been offered the position of deputy director, an extremely powerful post whose responsibilities included overseeing the Agency’s covert action programs. But he had declined for several reasons, the most important that he thought he would be a lightning rod for controversy, since he had made many more enemies since leaving the Agency.