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 90-96Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 90-91 Summary
Carrying a staggering Trent between them, Puller and Cole return through the ventilation shaft to the firehouse and outside with less than one minute to spare. If Robert Puller’s plan doesn’t work, they have only seconds to live.
The plan works; the dynamite throws off the timing of the bomb’s detonator and prevents the thermonuclear explosion. Even so, the detonation blows off the top of the dome and throws Puller, Cole, and Trent a hundred feet. Trent’s head is crushed against a tree. Cole starts to get up, but a chunk of falling concrete slams into her head and kills her. For the first time, Puller cries over a fallen comrade.
Puller attends Cole’s funeral. Jean stops him afterward. She tells him Randy has a brain tumor; it might kill him, or it might not. Puller advises her to take her brother with her and follow her dream to move to Italy and open a B&B.
Chapters 92-93 Summary
Puller catches up to Bill Strauss in South America. He gives Strauss a choice: Testify against his co-conspirators and spend the rest of his life in prison or be executed for treason. Puller tells Strauss he has already figured out that Strauss was the brains behind Trent Exploration, and as the money guy, he had every opportunity to embezzle from the company. Just before fleeing town, Strauss dumped Trent in the Bunker with all the company’s financial records. Trent and the evidence would disappear, and everyone would assume Trent was the embezzler.
Puller reminds Strauss that his allies had Dickie murdered and asks if Strauss doesn’t want revenge for that. Strauss tells him that Dickie was always an embarrassment to him because of his sexual orientation and that he forced Dickie to enlist in the Army because he thought it would make a real man of him. Facing a choice between death and prison, Strauss agrees to testify against his partners. He claims that he is motivated by vengeance for his son’s death, but Puller knows Strauss really only cares about saving his own life.
Chapters 94-96 Summary
Back in DC, Puller returns from a run to find six men waiting for him by his car. Four of them are the men who took him to meet Mason the first time. One he doesn’t know, and the last is Joe Mason himself. Mason asks why Puller never reported back to him. Puller explains that Mason was the only person who knew about Dickie Strauss, so when Dickie was killed, Puller did some digging and found out that Mason and Bill Strauss knew each other. Puller’s theory is that when Dickie told his father what was in the Bunker, Strauss called Mason. Mason saw a way to profit; he would steal the plutonium and uranium. The bomb would appear to be the work of terrorists. The government would assume the terrorists had stolen the rest of the abandoned nuclear material and would keep it quiet rather than admit it had left radioactive material unsecured.
Puller also figured out that Strauss hired Eric Treadwell to manufacture some of the bomb parts without telling him what they were for. Treadwell and Bitner got suspicious, found the blueprints, and went to Reynolds asking for his help. Bitner, Treadwell, and the Reynolds family had to be killed to keep them quiet.
Mason snarls that Puller has now made it much harder for Mason to sell the stolen uranium and plutonium, and he owes Puller payback for that. The fifth man he brought with him is a Russian expert in pain. The Russian advances on Puller. Puller takes him out and disables Mason, and then 20 Army Rangers appear along with General Julie Carson. Mason’s remaining henchmen surrender.
Puller visits his brother at USDB. Robert received a commendation for his role in disarming the bomb, but he is still in prison. Puller has some leave saved up. He gets on the road with no plan and no destination. He thinks about Sam Cole. He’s going to remember her for the rest of his life; she made him a better person. He has a feeling he’s going to come back to the Army stronger than before, and he owes that to Cole.
Chapters 90-96 Analysis
The reader might not have shed any tears for Roger Trent if Cole and Puller had left him behind, but heroes don’t leave even contemptible men to die, and that is all Trent is—contemptible, not profoundly evil. They could move faster without him, in which case they might have gotten further from the dome and Cole might not have been struck by the block that killed her, but they could never have brought themselves to abandon him.
Trent’s death is down to chance, but Puller sees Cole’s death as something different. When Puller took his second chance, he knew he might have to pay the ultimate price. When Cole refused to leave him, she wound up paying that price for him. She believed he deserved someone to take the risk for him.
With Cole’s death, Jean and Randy have no family left but each other, and there is no knowing how long they will have even that. It depends on whether Randy’s brain tumor can be treated. Now that they no longer have Roger coming between them, they may be able to put their bickering behind them and take care of each other.
The defusing of the bomb is a second chance for Robert, too. Symbolically, preventing an act of treason either redeems or exonerates Robert. If Robert is guilty, then preventing this attack redeems him—morally, if not in the eyes of the law. If the act symbolizes his innocence, that would explain why the Defense Secretary okayed Robert’s participation in the mission. Someone very high up in the hierarchy knows that Robert is innocent and has some unknown reason for concealing the fact.
Strauss clearly cares for nobody but himself. He recognizes that pretending to be outraged by his son’s murder will make him look more sympathetic, but he barely even knows how to play the role. His feelings about his son’s sexual orientation again raise the theme of unhealthy stereotypes regarding masculinity and the fear of appearing “feminine.”
In the big reveal, the detective ties up all the threads, showing the reader how the pieces fit together. When this is done well, the reader has all the same information as the detective and perhaps feels chagrined that he or she didn’t notice or recognize the significance of some key detail. Or perhaps the reader has the satisfaction of solving the puzzle before the protagonist. The author doesn’t reveal Puller’s suspicion about Mason when it first arises, but by the rules of the mystery genre, the author is only obligated to make sure the reader has all the same information as the detective. In this case, most of the clues point solidly at Trent Exploration, and other clues, like the soil sample and Mason’s story about the terrorists, are incongruous enough that an alert reader could have identified them as red herrings. Puller merely confirmed what the most astute readers would already have guessed. It is easy for Puller to think in terms of terrorists due to his experiences in the Middle East. Part of him still feels trapped there by his recurring dreams. Back on US soil, he has to adjust his thinking.
By taking a leave from the Army, Puller symbolically leaves behind some of the things that have been keeping him frozen—his enmeshment with his father and the experiences in the Middle East that left him feeling both helpless and closed off from other people. He still loves the Army, and he means to come back, but when he does, he will do so as a stronger and better man.
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