As a gentle breeze filtered through the medieval buildings of the city’s old town neighborhood, an unexceptional-looking man with short, gray hair—nobody who would ever get a second look—continued to pace down the street Bozardar Filipovic. “Four degrees off the median,” he said softly. “The apartment block on the middle of the street. Top floor. Got a visual?”

The woman repositioned slightly, and adjusted her Swarovski 12 × 50: the gunman lying in wait filled the scope. The scarred visage was familiar from her face book: Milic Pavlovic. Not one of the Serb fanatics of Dubrovnik, but a seasoned and highly skilled assassin who had earned their trust.

The terrorists had sent the best.

But then so had the Vatican, which sought to eliminate the assassin without the world knowing what it had done.

The executive security business was only formally a new pursuit for Janson and Kincaid. For that matter, it was only formally a business: as Jessica had pointed out, the millions that remained in Janson’s Cayman Islands account were his to keep—if he hadn’t earned it, who had? Still, as Janson had said, they were too young to put themselves out to pasture. He had tried that—tried to run from who he was. That was not the answer for him, for either of them; he knew that now. It was the hypocrisy—the hubris of the planners—against which he rebelled. But for better or worse, neither of them had been made for a peaceable existence. “I’ve done the small-island-in-the-Caribbean thing,” Janson had explained. “It gets old fast.” The bountiful cash reserves simply meant that the partnership could be selective in choosing its clients and that there would be no need to stint on operating expenses.

Now Kincaid spoke in a low voice, knowing that the filament mike carried her words straight to Janson’s earpiece. “Goddamn Kevlar body armor,” she said, stretching her long, loose-jointed body beneath the layers of bulletproof mesh. She always found it uncomfortably hot, protested his insistence that she wear it. “Tell me the truth—do you think it makes me look fat?”

“You think I’m gonna answer that while you’ve got a bullet in the chamber?”

She found her spot-weld—stock to cheek—as the craggy-faced assassin assembled his bipod, and inserted the magazine into his long rifle.

The pope would be making his appearance in minutes.

Janson’s voice in her ear again: “Everything OK?”

“Like clockwork, snookums,” she said.

“Just be careful, all right? Remember, the backup shooter’s in the warehouse at location B. If they get wind of you, you’re in his range.”

“I’m on top of it,” she said, suffused with the deep, glowing calm of a perfectly positioned marksman.

“I know,” he said. “I’m just saying, be careful.”

“Don’t worry, my love,” she said. “It’ll be a walk in the park.”