The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,269

her nonscope eye, the cityscape of Dubrovnik seemed oddly flattened, red-tiled roofs scattered before her like colored faience, shards of ancient pottery. Beneath the bell tower where she had been positioned for the past several hours, there was a sea of faces that continued several hundred yards to the wooden platform that had been erected in the center of Dubrovnik's old town.

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.

As a gentle breeze filtered through the medieval buildings of the city's old town neighborhood, an unexceptionable-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 12X50: 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, s 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."