From Tinsley’s perspective, his rivals had gone about hunting this man the wrong way. Why try to anticipate a man who was purposefully trying to be unpredictable? It was foolish. Instead, Tinsley had crawled through the vile sewage of the Sarajevo sewer system, eventually taking a position in a storm drain that gave him an unobstructed view of a compromised safe house that had sat empty for eighteen months. Things had gotten very hot for the target as more and more of his sanctuaries were compromised. Tinsley’s stakeout wasn’t based on actionable intelligence, but instead on the assumption that eventually, given enough time, the target would believe the safe house forgotten and risk using it again. Eventually, as the UN closed in on him, as the pressure built, Tinsley’s target would mistake the passing of time for the passing of memory.

Tinsley lay in a burbling stream of human waste, waiting for a shot that might not ever come. The smell was the smell of death and a city unmade by war. He’d brought food and water for two months, but found it hard to keep down and lost more than twenty-five pounds during the stakeout. Unwilling to risk giving away his position, he hadn’t moved from his spot and had slept with his chin resting on his balled-up fists so he didn’t drown in the filth.

The conditions in the sewer were inhuman, or so the advance team that swept the area ahead of the target’s arrival had assumed. It never occurred to them to look where no human could exist. But Tinsley had endured. Endured in that subterranean hell by switching himself off and going into something akin to a fugue state. Aware only of the building a hundred yards away, he allowed the time to pass in an instant, patiently waiting for his prey to pass in front of his nest.

The shot itself had been routine by comparison. A clear, bright night with only a slight breeze from the south-southwest—an amateur hunter could have made it. Tinsley was already slinking away into the darkness before the splinters of skull and viscera had settled like a fatal sleet on the face of the startled bodyguard.