And Zack realizes immediately. They both have these simpler, dumber, off-the-discount-rack, do-nothing phones for the same reason. Because of what had happened with their previous ones. Stripped-down phones to stay out of trouble. To not get into any phone trouble again.

To stay out of trouble? Look what’s happening. Look who he is sitting with.

Zack looks at the phones.

The same exact phones.

Only, they’re not.

He picks up the two phones and turns them over, slowly.

“They look the same,” Zack says cautiously. “They’re the same model, for sure.” He looks up at Joey. “But, Joey, they’re not the same.”

Joey squints at the phones.

“Look closer at yours. See how it’s slightly thicker? And look along the back cover of yours. See how it’s blackened along the seam?”

Joey leans in and looks silently.

“Joey, your phone has been opened.”

Joey sits up, anxious, alarmed, roused into a different state.

“It’s been opened,” says Zack again, barely believing it himself, “and you’d never know except by comparing yours to mine.”

“That’s impossible,” says Joey indignantly. “You’re wrong. They bought this off the shelf for me.”

“Joey, this is no longer an off-the-shelf disposable.” He says it with exaggerated slowness, letting the logic sink in, for both of them. “Either someone’s worked on it without your knowing or they switched it on you without your knowing.” Zack sits up, pulling himself away from the phone instinctively. “Someone’s been in it, Joey.”

Will, Joey thinks. Will.

Altering the phone, thinks Zack.

Opened. Altered. Slightly thicker. To put something in there?

Zack and Joey stare at the phones on the table.

Zack slowly slides his own phone away from Joey’s and puts it back in his own pocket. Leaving only Joey’s between them.

Joey looks afraid to touch it.

“What is it? What did they do?” Joey asks, petulant, childish.

“Oh, it’s still a phone,” says Zack. “You texted me, then called me, right?”

Joey nods.

Zack looks at it. “But we’ve got to figure it’s also…well, more than just a phone.”

Joey looks questioningly. “Like what?”

Zack takes a long, slow breath before he says it. Something that would have never come to mind, he realizes, if he weren’t sitting across from an assassin.

“Like a remote trigger of some sort.”

“A trigger?”

“That sends a signal to detonate some device that’s within range. Or…”

Joey looks alarmed. “Or what?”

Zack swallows hard. “Or it detonates itself.”

A diePhone, thinks Zack.

More of a diePhone than Joey’s previous one.

More of a diePhone than ever.

54.

54.

Who? Where? When?

The primal questions about the target dance in Zack’s head immediately, loudly, bouncing into one another, unanswerable.