Tinsley admired such dedication to a craft. His craft required mastery of many skills, but above all else it demanded an appreciation of time. Tinsley had made a lifetime study of the way time affected people. The way it toyed with their good judgment and perspective. Made them impatient or rash. Made them take irrational risks. Time was the great leveler, and neither money nor power held sway over its relentless march. That was precisely what made Tinsley so good at his work. Most people didn’t understand that—what really went into being a sniper. The shot wasn’t the hard part. The shot was ten thousand hours of practice, tens of thousands of rounds, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the environment’s effect on ballistics. No, the shot was the easy part. It simply required time, and the will to spend it. The hard part was the waiting.

Time did not affect Fred Tinsley as it did most people. Most people were overawed by time. They allowed time to bully them, fearing that it was passing too fast or too slowly, sometimes both simultaneously. But not Tinsley. He was indifferent to the passage of time, and it flowed around him effortlessly.

Inside his arid, primeval brain—and Tinsley thought of himself as almost prehistoric, something unspoiled by the softening influence of progress—he could look out at the world, blink, and in the time it took for his eyes to reopen, weeks could pass. It made him immune to boredom, to doubt or need; the privations that drove ordinary men mad did not concern him. But most of all it made him a patient, cunning predator.

When he was a young man and still plied his trade with a rifle, Tinsley once spent twenty-six days in a sewer drain in Sarajevo. It was during the height of the siege. The city and the country were in chaos despite the United Nations’s best efforts. His target, a particularly nihilistic lieutenant of Slobodan Milošević’s, had earned a nasty reputation that stood out even among the nasty reputations of that despicable war. The string of atrocities of which his target was accused was enough to earn a “kill not capture” order and a bounty that had drawn the interests of professionals across Europe.

Unfortunately for them, the target had proven resilient and difficult to kill. Dozens of attempts on his life only served to make him extraordinarily careful and paranoid, shuttling between safe houses and constantly revising his plans. This made it impossible to predict his movements or to find a pattern, and no one had been able to get close enough to claim the bounty.