They were the faithful, the devoted. It was lost on none of them that the pope had decided to start off his visit to Croatia by addressing an audience in a city that had come to symbolize the suffering of its people. Though more than a decade had passed since the Yugoslav army laid siege to the Adriatic port city, the memory of the assault remained undimmed among the town’s citizens.

Many of them had stamp-sized laminated photographs of the beloved pontiff. It wasn’t merely that he was someone known to be willing to speak truth to power; it was the unmistakable radiance he had about him—charisma, yes, but also compassion. It was typical of him that he would not merely decry violence and terrorism from the safety of the Vatican; he would take his message of peace to the very heartlands of strife and separatism. Indeed, word had already got out that the pope intended to address a history that most Croatians preferred to forget. In the ancient conflict between Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths, there was much cause for contrition on both sides. And it was time, the pontiff believed, for the Vatican and Croatia alike to confront the brutally fascistic legacy of the country’s Ustashi authority during the Second World War.

Though Croatia’s leadership, and much of its citizenry, was bound to react with dismay, his moral courage had seemingly only increased the devotion of his throngs of admirers here. It had also—Janson’s suspicions had recently been confirmed by his contacts in the capital city of Zagreb—resulted in a carefully organized assassination plot. An embittered secessionist movement of minority Serbs would avenge their own historic grievances by murdering the figure whom this predominantly Catholic nation venerated above all others. In silent collusion was a network of extreme Croatian nationalists: they feared the pontiff’s reform-minded tendencies and sought an opportunity to extirpate the treacherous minorities who had taken root among them. After such a monstrous provocation—and no provocation could be greater than the slaying of a beloved pope—none would stand in their way. Indeed, even ordinary citizens would willingly join in the sanguinary business of cleansing Croatia.

Like all extremists, of course, they had an inability to anticipate the consequences of their actions beyond the immediate realization of their goals. The Serbs’ murderous act would indeed be repaid, ten thousandfold, in the blood of his ethnic kin. Yet those massacres would inevitably inspire the Serbian government to intervene forcibly: Dubrovnik and other Croatian cities would again be shelled by Serbian forces, compelling Croatia itself to declare war upon its Serbian antagonists. A conflagration would, once more, burst upon this most unstable corner of Europe—dividing neighboring countries into allies and adversaries, and with what ultimate results, nobody could say. A global conflict had once been sparked by a Balkan assassination; it could happen again.