When he reached the top of the stairs, he saw a dark face and the glow of eyes. He raised the gun as a reflex before he realized it was only a mirror. He stepped forward, and the image of himself grew larger. A large window over the home’s foyer allowed the moonlight to illuminate his form, but he had to lean his seven-foot frame down in order to look into his own eyes.

But were they his eyes or were they Kruger’s?

He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t differentiate the line between Idris, the husband and father, and Kruger, the professional killer and mercenary who was spoke of in certain circles as a phantom. He had only allowed Kruger to be a mere shadow, a predator, a weapon, a tool used to print money for Idris. But now he couldn’t decide if Kruger had taken over or lost all control.

And then he was back in the squatter camp, going from house to house. He saw his own hands bringing down the blade over and over, chopping off pieces of what had once been people so poor they slept in the dirt. But in his ears, he didn’t hear the ripping and breaking of sinew and bone. He heard his mother’s screams and the growls of the lions.

Suddenly aware of his surroundings, he stood back up to full height and checked his watch. Cursing himself, he double-checked his weapons out of pure habit. He had succumbed to another fugue and had apparently been staring into the mirror for a full five minutes.

On most of his missions such a lapse would have resulted in his death. He was lucky that this particular target was sleeping peacefully and had no one to watch over him. But Kruger knew that luck only held out so long. It only took one mistake, one second of lost focus. He needed to get out of the game. And he needed to do it quickly or he wouldn’t have to worry about whether he was truly Idris or Kruger, because they would both be dead.

He opened the bedroom door and crept inside. Fred Little slept on his back and was snoring like a bear. The thin sheet had been kicked away and only covered a portion of Fred’s torso. He wore nothing but a white T-shirt and checkered boxer shorts. This routine had been verified on three previous nights using a remote-controlled drone to peer into Fred’s bedroom window.

Kruger gently moved the sheet aside and pulled up on the leg of Fred’s boxer shorts. Then he retrieved the Q-tip from the tube and swabbed the injection site. The local anesthetic would keep Fred from feeling the penetration of the needle. He waited a moment to be sure the numbing effect had taken hold, and then he injected the succinylcholine into the middle third of Fred’s upper thigh, straight into vastus lateralis muscle.

He waited a few moments for the drug to spread through his target’s system. As he waited, he watched Fred sleep. Kruger knew from his research that Fred was the youngest of three boys born to a wealthy farming family in rural Kentucky. His inherited money allowed Fred to attend college at MIT and study robotics, but to Kruger’s eyes, Fred still looked like he belonged in the backwoods, hunting and fishing, with his auburn brush pile mustache and long sideburns cut into a point in the middle of his cheeks. But Kruger definitely wasn’t judging the man. He—or rather his alter ego, Idris Madeira—had been born in a small village in Mozambique and felt more at home on the savannah than in a jungle of concrete.