Zero Day

Puller goes to the Army Navy club to meet the sender of the anonymous text. At the club bar, he meets his contact, Lieutenant Strickland, who tells him she knows he is investigating her mentor Colonel Reynolds’s death. According to Strickland, two weeks ago, Reynolds told her he had met someone in West Virginia who told him something that made him uneasy, but he didn’t give Strickland details. Puller concludes that Reynolds would have told his superior officer, General Carson, about his discovery, but she never mentioned it in their interview.

Puller goes to General Carson’s apartment and asks her what Colonel Reynolds really told her. She admits that Reynolds told her he had discovered something that might have national security connections and that whatever it was would happen soon; then, when Reynolds was murdered, Carson realized she would be blamed for not reporting the situation up the line. She panicked and tried to cover up. Puller asks her why she didn’t report it initially. She says it was because she didn’t have enough information to verify Reynolds’s claim, but she also saw an opportunity for advancement. She is broken up by the deaths of Reynolds and his wife and children and by her failure to live up to the Army’s standards. Puller decides not to expose her. He figures everybody is entitled to one professional screwup.

On his way back to his car, Puller is intercepted by four men from Homeland Security. They take him to Joe Mason of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Mason tells Puller that the National Security Administration has picked up some chatter coming from Drake. The language is an Afghan dialect embedded in an old KGB code; something big is going to go down in Drake. DHS can’t evacuate the population because doing so would alert the terrorists, and the terrorists would just back off and pick a new target.

Puller brings up the government facility under the dome. Mason says he has already checked it out; it used to make bomb components and sometimes handle radioactive material, but all the components and material have been removed, so it can’t be relevant to the terrorist activity.

Puller returns to Drake, where Cole has a copy of the soil report Reynolds ordered. The report contains nothing remotely suspicious. During the drive to the Reynolds murder scene, Puller tells Cole about the DHS connection but not that that that DHS is using Drake as bait for the terrorists. He’s been told to keep that quiet, and he knows that Cole would be morally obligated to raise the alarm and that would scare the terrorists off before they could be caught.

Arriving at the Reynolds house, Puller notices that the neighbors’ back porch overlooks the woods behind the houses. He decides to question them again. The neighbor George Dougett didn’t see anything the night of the murder, but he remembers seeing someone running toward the woods the next night shortly after officer Wellman’s murder. Doug describes the figure as big, male, tall, and bald. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, and his arm looked blackened. The description matches that of Dickie Strauss.