They still haven’t told him what the target is. Normally you’re told in plenty of time for you to plan. But this time they’re doing the planning. Joey is just doing the execution.

Meeting with Zack and discovering the altered phone, he realizes how much more trapped he is than he even thought.

Maybe so trapped Zack can’t get him out.

Although the kid seems willing to try.

57.

57.

They all call him Karloff, he’d learned.

Like the scary Russian actor who played monsters in old movies.

Scary. A monster. He is fine with that.

He had grown up in Bulgaria.

In Bulgaria, he was trained to murder as a child. Children are effective assassins because no one sees it coming and prosecution is so difficult. It was a terrifying time in Bulgaria, though comparatively brief, because it got so much attention that the police and other authorities acted swiftly. These were not boy soldiers in a lawless African proto-republic. These were killers for hire in urban centers run by crime syndicates.

In fact, when he was caught, after personally committing five murders, he was held while legal maneuvering took place around him. Extenuating circumstances. A child. How could he be responsible for his actions? Did he even understand the consequences? In a bureaucratic kerfuffle and a switch of ruling parties in Sofia, the capital, he was released pending a hearing (the adult perpetrators, the trainers, were not; they were eventually executed), and he boarded a steamer for Sardinia, and then one to Morocco, and eventually he made his way to the United States.

These are things only a few people know. And no one around him.

When Joey was released thanks to the mysteries of the Cloud, Karloff had of course seen such judicial results before. It reverberated with his childhood, with another lifetime.

He knows personally the limits of the justice system. He is here, alive, thriving, rich, because of those limits, those U-turns and side roads. And being ready and willing to take them.

The bureaucracy, the changing political parties, or the legal system had expunged his name completely from the public record. Only a child, after all. Let him start over. Like he never existed. Like he never killed. He saw how legal systems worked. He learned the considerable advantages of nonexistence. And he saw that the vaunted and prideful American justice system could be as flawed and as fragile and as manipulated as Bulgaria’s.

He had learned more than murder in those days, working for that gang. He was wealthy now but pathologically quiet and always in motion. No monuments to himself, no showy testament to the good life, nothing to draw attention. His showiness is all in his reputation, whose mystery and whispers of ruthlessness are themselves useful.

He isn’t nostalgic. He doesn’t see something of himself in Joey Richter. Joey is an unimaginative idiot. Autistic, compromised. A tethered animal.