Janson moved carefully, sheltering himself from the riflewoman by keeping himself low and behind the projecting brick gable while he snaked himself up the incline of the slate roof. He had to execute his next move perfectly, or he was dead. Now he kept his head down as his hands lifted the muzzle of the AKS-74 over the roofline. He relied on memory, on a fleeting image from the periscope, as he directed a burst of fire toward the long barrel of the rifle. An answering clang—the sound of metal-jacketed bullets striking a long barrel fashioned of a super-hard composite resin—told him he had succeeded.

Now he raised his head over the roofline and directed a second, more targeted burst: the steel-tipped bullets tore into the barrel of Holmes’s M40 until the green-black shaft shattered.

Holmes was now defenseless, and when his eyes met Janson’s it was with the resigned, almost weary look of someone convinced he was about to die.

Janson shook his head disgustedly. Holmes was not his enemy, even if he thought he was. He craned around and, peering through a loophole in the elaborate semicircular pediment, was able to glimpse the brunette diagonally opposite. Would she take him out with one of her trademark double taps? She had seen what had happened, knew that her colleague was out of commission and that she would have to assume responsibility for a larger field. Would she wait until he moved from the protection of the second gable? The slotlike loophole was too narrow and deep to permit a clean shot from a diagonal perch. She would have to wait. Time was a sniper’s best friend—and his mortal foe.

He squinted and brought her face into focus. She was no longer in shooting position—had broken from her spot-weld with the rifle and was staring at her colleague with a look filled with uncertainty. A moment later, Janson saw a flicker of movement behind her, and then something more dramatic: an attic door burst open and a giant of a man loomed suddenly behind the slight brunette. He smashed something over her head—Janson could not quite make it out; it could have been the butt of a long firearm. The brown-haired woman slumped limply to the parapet, evidently unconscious. Now the giant seized her bolt-action rifle and squeezed off one, two, three shots to his right. The strangled cry from the adjoining roof told him that at least one had hit its target: Stephen Holmes.