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Chapter 9
She decided to wake Daniel up. Once Batman came around—which he probably would in about fifteen minutes or so—the conversation was not going to be very genteel. She wanted a chance to explain—and apologize— before the shrieking and the death threats started.
The fact that she didn’t flee is giving “99 cents short of a dollar”. Kevin all but told her that she’d been set up, and it was also something that she acknowledged too.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU STAY?!
“Now will you tell me what happened to your face? Did you have an accident?”
Again with the concern. “No. My injures are related to that new information I mentioned.” She wasn’t sure how to break it to him.
Sudden indignation. His shoulders tensed. “Somebody did that to you— on purpose? For hurting me?”
Holy fucking shit dude. The lady tortured you. I don’t care what she said during her apology, SHE FUCKING TORTURED YOU.
I’m all in favour of nice guys. After reading an endless string of billionaire romances, it’s nice that somebody doesn’t take one look at Julie and say “Hey baby, I’m going to sexually assault you. And you’re going to like it because I’m hot. And also rich.”
But holy fucking shit. Daniel is going around and he’s flat out stupid about how nice he is.
Alex suppressed a sigh, upset with herself for not worrying more about the file’s gaps in information, for not taking the time to find a faraway library where she could have safely searched all Daniel’s family connections.
It’s this, but also the fact that she got the files, and then grabbed Daniel two days later. Like you literally never thought to look into literally ANY of this?
“I would say I was smarter, but I made some pretty huge mistakes in my security here. I think I was just luckier this time.”
No fucking shit. She had such huge, gaping holes that I could have waltzed into her little set-up. Me, an unathletic civilian with no training whatsoever.
Was it safe to go back to her most recent home, the place she’d been living when Carston had contacted her? It would certainly be easiest. There was food there, and no one would have to see her face for as long as it took to look normal again. She didn’t think she’d compromised the house…
But then what? How much of her nest egg had she blown through for this stupid trap? How long would she be able to keep going on what she had?
Man, forget the house, forget the job, forget the money. The department tried to set you up… AGAIN.
Exactly how long is it going to take for it to sink in that the department wants her dead?
Girl, you willingly walked into an obvious set-up with that… What number did she use again? Oh right… THREE GODDAMNED PERCENT THAT IT WASN’T A TRAP.
“But I think your brother can probably fill you in on the details. I imagine he’s better at hiding than I am.”
Bitch, I’m fucking better at hiding than you are. AND YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE SPY HERE.
“Are you kidding me? That psychopath tortured you.”
“Not for very long. And she only did it because—”
“Are you defending that—”
Finally, some goddamned common sense!
“You’re the one who pulled Danny into this—”
She literally told him that the mystery agency she works for handed her a file on Daniel and all but told her “Take care of this.”
“So what does it matter? I died. Danny shouldn’t be a target anymore.”
The fact that you are here should have been a huge tip that it isn’t true.
“You’re a problem for the CIA. I’m a problem for my department. At the top, the people involved in both our former workplaces are pretty tight. So they offer me a deal: ‘Do a job for us, and we’ll call off the hunt.’ They must have had it worked out pretty solidly before they contacted me. Fixed the files, got ready to feed me the crisis story I can’t turn my back on.”
Again, 100% of this could have been avoided if Julie hadn’t been so stupid and in a rush. If she’d spent literally any amount of time researching, she would have realised that it was actually a trap.
There was a sudden earsplitting noise—an explosive fragmenting of wood. And then the enraged snarling got a lot closer.
Chapter 9 summary: Julie wakes up from her little catnap, and wakes Daniel up. She then apologises to him for having KIDNAPPED AND TORTURED HIM. He’s like “Ah, what’s a little torture?” The entire thing is maddening; Julie has no idea why he’s so goddamned nice, but tries to chalk it up to the drug she initially injected him with. (I’m not convinced.)
Daniel is more upset when Julie reveals that Kevin is still alive. The two of them talk for several pages about stuff that I literally can’t remember, even moments after finishing the chapter. When Kevin wakes up, Daniel chews his brother out for having lied to him about his job (he wasn’t a drug dealer), where he was (not in prison lol), and then having faked his own death. Again, Daniel is way more upset about Kevin than the goddamned TORTURE.
Julie then points out that obviously Kevin did a botched job of faking his own death. That’s what led to this situation. That both agencies got together and decided that no matter what happened in this situation, that one of their problems would be taken care of. She offers to write to her agency to tell them that she killed Kevin. That way, Kevin and Daniel can go back to whatever they were doing before all of this.
At the end of the chapter, the dog breaks out from the room Julie locked him in.
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Chapter 8
The pictures that were Daniel but at the same time weren’t.
The holes in the file on Daniel’s history, the missing photos.
Time, dates, birth dates —the easiest small changes to make if you wanted to hide something.
Daniel’s strange reluctance to believe what he was seeing when he looked at the spy images.
His struggles with loyalty.
Those long, long fingers.
“Other Daniel,” she whispered.
Is this book seriously trotting out the “evil identical twin” trope? JFC stop.
She nodded to the photographs scattered on the floor. He seemed to notice them for the first time. He leaned over to examine one, then bent down to grab it. Then the one underneath, and the next. He crumpled t
hem in his fist.
“Where did you get these?” “Compliments of a small department working for the American government—entirely off the books. I used to be in their employ. They asked me to freelance.”
His face contorted in outrage. “This is highly classified!”
“You wouldn’t believe my clearance level.”
And what? He thought that somebody grabbed Daniel, took him to a farmhouse dozens of miles outside of the city, and started torturing him… FOR FUNSIES?!
“Well, since you already know the details, I guess it’s not a huge breach of policy for me to tell you that I shut down the de la Fuentes situation six months ago. De la Fuentes’s death is not common knowledge. What’s left of the cartel is keeping this quiet so they don’t appear vulnerable to the competition.”
Naturally, the mysterious government agency that couldn’t be bothered to find out that Kevin Beach is still alive, also can’t be bothered to find out that the terrorist HASN’T BEEN ALIVE FOR HALF A YEAR.
First things first. She reset the screen saver on her computer to come on after fifteen minutes of inactivity.
I love how she knocks Kevin out, and the first thing she does is the most inane activity imaginable.
Explaining things? Pfft! Not in this book!
Back to Other Daniel. The Batsuit was a chore to remove.
The stupidest thing about this is that as soon as Julie saw him, she identified him as Kevin Beach, Daniel’s supposed-to-be-dead identical twin brother.
SO WHY THE FUCKITY FUCK IS SHE STILL CALLING HIM “OTHER DANIEL” AND “BATMAN”?!
There would be repercussions to deal with. She needed time to rest and heal —time no one was going to give her.
Chapter 8 summary: Julie tells the mystery man (she will not stop calling him “Batman” because he’s dressed in all black; I refuse to stoop to her level of stupidity) that she’s sedated Daniel. The mystery man then ties Julie to a chair, and takes the gas mask off. Julie is surprised that it’s Daniel’s identical twin brother… the one who’s supposed to be dead.
He then finds the photos of him talking to the Mexican drug lord who’s supposed to be in charge of this terrorist attack. Julie spills everything, about the attempts on her life, about being asked to step in to deal with “Daniel”. She guesses from the gun Kevin has that he’s CIA, but that if not even her agency knew Kevin was still alive, that he’s working off the books with this one. Kevin is more angry that somebody tortured his brother than the fact that somebody’s clearly setting both Julie and Kevin up (and using Daniel as bait).
Julie then… somehow or another, gases both Kevin and his giant dog. Julie holds her breath, and despite the fact that her hands are zip-tied behind her back, she manages to put the gas mask on. She frees herself before she locks the dog into a room, and parks the car in front of the door to prevent it from getting out. After that, she checks Daniel’s body all over more closely for a tracking device, and finds one “nestled against his femoral artery”. She figures that it sent out an alert when she started torturing Daniel, which is why Kevin swooped in to save the day.
She then resets her broken nose. And will not shut up about the mysterious chemical concoction she made that she nicknamed “survive”. It’s kept intentionally vague, but the only thing I can think about is that it’s mainly to hide how dumb the entire thing is. She then passes out on the cot.
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Chapter 6
By three thirty in the morning, she was up, dressed, and fed, still exhausted but ready to start.
I’m really hoping that there’s going to be more actual plot in this chapter. Not holding my breath, but we can hope, can’t we?
Daniel Beach had two sides, and so did she. She was her other self now, the one the department called the Chemist, and the Chemist was a machine. Pitiless and relentless. Her monster was free now.
It’s honestly kind of difficult to take anything she does seriously, if only because this supposed highly-trained spy literally brought the subject into a taxi, to the fucking airport. Even I know that you don’t fucking do that.
How good could her “The Chemist” side be that it somehow overrides that level of spy incompetence?
“I am not that kind of doctor, Daniel. And I didn’t help you. I drugged you and I kidnapped you.”
His face was sober. “You were kind to me.”
Oh good grief, he’s fucking stupid.
“Um, is this some kind of fetish fantasy thing?” he asked in a low voice, somehow finding a way to sound embarrassed despite the bizarreness of his circumstances. “I don’t really know the rules for that stuff…”
I’m going to play this off as Meyer’s commentary about 50 Shades of Grey, and not the fact that Daniel is too stupid to function.
Without really looking at him, she replaced the gag as soon as his mouth opened. Then, dropping the other syringes, she escaped the room.
Chapter 6 summary: After getting some sleep, Julie preps for her torture session, and begins an IV drip to wake Daniel up. As she’s waiting, she tells the readers that she’s become her alter-ego of The Chemist. I said what I said about that. But she’s under the impression that Daniel also has one, or that he has Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly known as “multiple personality disorder”).
Daniel wakes up, and he’s naturally freaked out. The narration plays up him acting pretty stupid, but the only thing that it’s telling me, the neutral outsider, is that the mysterious agency Julie worked for has not only set Julie up, but also the random innocent, Daniel.
She gives him the first round of injections, and then leaves him for about 10 minutes for it to completely wear off. When she comes back, she again tries to ask about his criminal activities, especially his trips to Egypt. He keeps saying that he’s never been, that she can check his passport info, that he’s only ever been to Mexico. She shows him a photo of himself and Fuentes in Egypt, but he insists that it isn’t him. He also insists that he doesn’t have millions in the bank, because then he wouldn’t be living in a shithole in the bad part of DC, getting sick because the only thing he can afford is ramen.
The chapter ends with Julie giving him the second dose of her mystery torture drug.
Even if they’d clocked her getting on and off the last train, they’d be hard-pressed to keep track of one cab in a sea of identical cabs twisting together through rush hour.
I’ve seen enough crime dramas to 100% tell you that they watched as Julie helped Daniel into the cab. They made note of the taxi number, and then called up the taxi dispatcher to find out who owned that cab. They’ll then asked the cabbie where they dropped the man and woman off. And the cabbie wouldn’t have any reason to NOT tell them.
Literally anywhere that Julie takes Daniel is likely going to have security cameras, and they can watch as they get onto a bus or into a car Julie has waiting or whatever’s going to happen next.
“Sure. This is the airport.”
“Yes, that’s where my car is.”
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU GO TO THE AIRPORT?! Holy shit, there are so many security cameras there.
It’s like this is Julie’s first day of being a spy.
“No, just born this way.” She got her coloring from her absentee father. Genetic testing had informed her that he was a mix of many things, predominantly Korean, Hispanic, and Welsh. She’d always wondered what he’d looked like. The combination with her mother’s Scottish background had created in her an oddly ordinary face—she could have been from almost anywhere.
NOBODY FUCKING CARES. STOP INTERRUPTING THE PLOT FOR THIS!!
She just had time to slip on her own gas mask before she was totally unconscious.
Chapter 5 summary: Julie and Daniel ride in a taxi, where he will not shut up about the girl’s volleyball team he coaches. Julie asks why he gave her his number, and he says he doesn’t know, but that he liked her face. That he usually doesn’t do stuff like giving random women his number… Or confessing to a near stranger that he thinks that she’s pretty.
They take the taxi to the airport, where she has a car waiting. She tells Daniel to lie down in the back, but then she injects him with something to get him to go to sleep for hours and hours. An hour outside of the city, she pulls off into the woods and starts inspecting him for a tracking device, but fails to find one. She then pulls off all of his clothes, because they might have external trackers in them. And she also ditches his laptop. This takes up so much page time while somehow barely going anywhere at all. I never imagined that the taxi scene would be the most interesting part of the chapter.
She then drives out to the safe house she’s renting for this. Although there is a house, she’s wired it up with light timers to make it look like somebody’s home. And meanwhile, she’s set up her workstation in the barn. Which we get to read ALL about, yet somehow literally not one single bit of it is important. She sticks a bunch of medical stuff onto/into Daniel before going to sleep herself.
