62 pages • 2 hours read
David BaldacciZero Day
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 61-70Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 61-63 Summary
As Cole and Puller are driving back through Drake, they encounter Roger Trent. Puller tells Trent he thinks that Molly Bitner’s death had to do with her working for Trent Exploration and that it has something to do with soil samples. Trent claims to know nothing about that, but Puller notices his hand shaking.
Their next move is to locate Dickie Strauss. They find him hanging out with his motorcycle club at an abandoned firehouse near the concrete dome. Dickie tries to flee on a dirt bike, but Puller shoots out the rear tire. Puller tells Dickie someone saw him running away from the Reynolds house. Dickie tells Puller he liked the Army and was proud of serving his country, but he was discharged for being gay when someone ratted him out. Puller acknowledges that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was an unjust policy. He says that he served with many gay people and all that mattered was that they did their jobs well.
Returning to the subject of the crime scene, Dickie explains that he was friends with Larry Wellman. He had wanted to see the murder scene, and Wellman agreed to let him inside, but when Dickie arrived, Wellman was already dead. Dickie says he doesn’t know anything about a soil report. When Puller asks about the meth lab, Dickie asks for a lawyer.
Chapters 64-66 Summary
Whatever Dickie is involved in, Puller doesn’t think it has to do with the murders, but he does suspect that Dickie knows something else that would help them crack the case. He offers Dickie a second chance to serve his country; Puller needs someone local to ask questions. Dickie agrees to the proposal. After Dickie leaves, Cole points out to Puller that the second chance Puller is giving Dickie could get him killed. Puller says that sometimes a second chance is worth the price.
Puller gets a call from Mason. The National Security Administration has received information that three days from now, the terrorists are planning to attack a natural gas pipeline run by Trent Exploration. While first responders converge on that, that terrorists will blow up a nearby nuclear plant. Puller has no way of knowing that Mason is setting him up. Actually, there are no terrorists. The whole story is a red herring to keep Puller looking in the wrong places. Puller tells Mason about Dickie.
Stopping at the library, Puller reads through archived newspapers to find that there was no blasting schedule posted for the night of the Reynolds murders. Kristin Craig, the forensic tech from USACIL, phones him. They found a microscopic fleck of gold foil on one of the bullets from the meth house murders, but they don’t know what it means. They also found tungsten carbide on some of the other items. Puller knows that tungsten carbide is sometimes used in armor-piercing ammunition. He guesses that armor-piercing ammo could rupture the gas pipeline and maybe the reactors at the nuclear plant.
Chapters 67-70 Summary
Puller finds Jean Trent’s Mercedes parked by his motel room. She invites him to lunch with her at her high-end bed and breakfast, which she bought and runs without any of Roger’s money. Puller learns that Jean has always dreamed of opening a B&B in Italy, but she reveals nothing relevant to that case, and she eventually returns Puller to his motel. Passing his car, he notices a footprint and a fleck of copper wire on the ground. He bends to look underneath the car and spots a bomb.
Later, Puller suggests to Cole that Jean was getting him out of the way while the terrorists planted the bomb. Cole says she can’t believe her sister could possibly be involved. Still, she tells Puller to follow the evidence no matter what. Puller confronts Jean. She admits that there have been financial irregularities at Trent Exploration; someone has been messing around with money and accounts. Trent’s business trip is a desperate attempt to recruit banks and investors to cover the shortfall. Puller also asks her whether Randy might have set the bomb, but Jean says Randy wouldn’t know how to build one.
Chapters 61-70 Analysis
Something has Trent worried, either because he’s afraid his involvement with terrorists will be exposed or if there is some other cause. If his financial difficulties are uncovered, he will lose his business, and what is probably more important to him, everyone will know about his failure. For someone as self-involved as Trent, public disgrace and exposure are the worst fate imaginable.
The biggest problem with the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy—apart from the unreasonable strain it placed on military personnel—was that it didn’t always prevent someone else from “telling” about a gay service man or woman, so even individuals who were discrete about their personal lives could be outed and discharged without violating the policy themselves. Puller demonstrates his fair-mindedness by acknowledging that Dickie’s discharge, and the policy that prompted it, was unjust. Puller measures people by qualities like courage and honor, not sex or sexual orientation. Dickie’s explanation of his presence at the Wellman murder scene covers all the facts Puller and Cole are aware of, but it is impossible to corroborate, and it does not get them any further in the case. Once again, an apparently promising lead has brought them to a dead end.
Dickie shows character in wanting to help his country rather than giving way to bitterness and resentment. He has suffered a lifetime of rejection for his orientation; his father’s haste in pulling him away when Puller asks about his discharge indicates that his father is embarrassed by his son’s sexual orientation, and Puller will learn in his final interview with Strauss that he pressured Dickie to join the Army in the hope that the very “masculine” environment of the military would act as a conversion therapy. Dickie accepts the role offered to him by Puller for two reasons: to serve his country and to prove his father and the Army wrong for their rejection of him. Like Puller, Dickie faces standards he can’t live up to.
Cole’s reference to the investigation possibly getting Dickie killed foreshadows Dickie’s death. Puller answers the way he does—that sometimes second chances are worth the price—because in his mind, second chances are a matter of life and death; he would have died for his father’s approval. Loving his father has demanded one long lifetime’s second chance that his father never earned, and Puller was never able to earn the second chance he wanted from his father.
Trent brags about being successful and creating jobs, but Jean is the actual successful business owner. she creates jobs for her community and benefits the economy by attracting tourism to an area of West Virginia not yet tainted by the ecological destruction of her husband’s mining. She offers a hint of hope that coal is not the only resource in the state. People struggling to meet their immediate needs lack the time, energy, and financial resources to look beyond coal mining, but Jean blazes the trail that may ultimately lead the people of Drake into a more prosperous future.
The conversation with Jean reveals nothing of importance to the case. It’s no wonder, then, that Puller suspects it was a ruse to get him away from the motel long enough for someone to plant the bomb. Cole’s statement to Puller to follow the evidence wherever it leads shows her commitment to truth and justice as well as her confidence in her sister. Meanwhile, Jean could have protested Randy’s innocence on the grounds that he would never harm anyone. Instead, she argues his innocence by virtue of incompetence. That argument is dismissive of her brother, but for all the Cole siblings’ contentious relationships, they do stand by each other.
The revelation about financial problems at Trent Exploration gives Roger Trent a motive for consorting with terrorists if he is desperate for money. Mason uses the deadline to prevent Puller from taking the time to follow up on Trent Exploration’s financial problems. Had Puller done so, the trail would have led him to Strauss and from Strauss to Mason and from Mason to the dome that Mason tried to steer him away from.
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