Zero Days

“[I]n this job, doing nothing was a risk in itself. Sometimes you just had to go on your gut—act on impulse.”

Jack relies on her intuition to help her when she must make important or quick decisions. Her claim that doing nothing—and waiting for an answer or path to reveal itself—can be risky is prescient. If she waited for the police to find Gabe’s killer, she’d likely be in jail with no idea what really happened. Jack’s words reflect her experience both before and after Gabe’s murder.

“It was the camaraderie, the sense that it was him and me against the world.”

Jack’s reflection on Gabe helps to characterize their partnership in every sense of the word. They are spouses and business partners, each with a stake in the other’s personal and professional roles. Rather than one having control over the other, like Jeff and Jack, or one depending on the other, they have a reciprocal relationship. Jack and Gabe are together at Arden Alliance and in everything else.

“Instead I lay, holding my breath, twisting the ring on my left hand round and round with my thumb. It was my usual tic in moments of stress—a habit somewhere between biting my nails and crossing my fingers, only one that involved Gabe. It made sense; at least half the time, my fate was in my husband’s hands.”

Jack’s description of her nervous tic helps to characterize her relationship with Gabe. As she is willing to put her life in his hands, she has tremendous trust and faith in him. That her engagement ring, a symbol of their commitment, is a comfort to her shows how calming Gabe’s love is.

“First rule of social engineering: stay pleasant and others are much more likely to do the same.”

Jack’s job as a pen tester requires more than physical dexterity. She must know how to talk to people in ways that will establish rapport and eliminate suspicion. She has a number of tricks to earn people’s trust. This line is akin to the adage “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“I could tell some stories too, I thought, but we both knew it was too late for that. I had tried to tell those stories once before, right around the time we broke up, and it hadn’t ended well.”

This line is the first clue that Jeff was abusive to Jack, that she tried to report the abuse, and that her reports had been ignored or used against her. Her relationship with Jeff is thrown into relief by juxtaposition to her marriage to Gabe. Though both men make comments of a sexual nature to Jack, Jeff’s are unwanted and inappropriate given their history and relationship status. His unwanted and inappropriate advances characterize Jeff as chauvinistic, self-absorbed, and vulgar.

“It was his throat. It had been cut, horribly, brutally, in a way I couldn’t make sense of—it wasn’t the neat surgical slash I would have imagined, but a fleshy mess protruding from a ragged hole, as if someone, something had ripped his windpipe out through the front of his neck, leaving a wound like a great scarlet laughing mouth.”

This description of Gabe’s body when Jack discovers it consists of a stark visual image and a horrifying simile. The image is shocking in its gruesomeness, emphasized by the repetition of slick, slashing sounds like “s” and “sh” throughout the line. The idea of something or someone laughing in connection with the murder feels absurd and grotesque, like the Joker’s smile in the Batman comics. Smiles and laughter are usually not associated with the butchery of a man in his home, making the line ironic and all the more jarring.

“This is like—it’s Kafkaesque. My husband is dead and you’re asking me about my phone battery?”

Jack’s allusion to the absurdist author Franz Kafka points toward her education and her feelings regarding her situation. “Kafkaesque” means nightmarishly bizarre or illogical. After finding her husband’s body with a dreadfully gruesome injury, she is questioned about events leading up to and following her discovery. Jack cannot understand why the detectives are asking about her cell phone in this context. She is innocent of the crime, but Malik believes her to be guilty.

“But in spite of their differences, Cole and Gabe’s friendship had endured, bonded at first by their shared fascination with computer games, tech, and coding, and then later by something much deeper—a genuine bone-deep love for each other that you had to be blind to miss.”

Jack’s description of Gabe and Cole’s friendship is the first information about Cole’s character in the text. Along with Gabe’s parents, Cole is one of the few people Jack knows she must tell in person about Gabe’s death. This characterization would seem to eliminate him from suspicion; however, their friendship is what led Gabe to speak to Cole about the zero-day before going to Cole’s employer.

“There’s a reason they always suspect spouses. You’ve got means, and you’ve got opportunity. The only thing they’re lacking to make a case is a motive. So please, please be really careful not to give them one.”

After seeing the email regarding Gabe’s life insurance policy, Jack recalls her sister’s words and realizes she’s being framed. Jack next runs from the police based on her distrust due to their mishandling of Jeff’s abuse. Only now does Jack understand the danger she is in and realize the police will never find who killed Gabe and why.

“[W]hoever had slit Gabe’s throat, I was almost certainly standing in their footsteps, my feet resting where theirs had, less than forty-eight hours ago.”

Jack figures out how Gabe’s killer entered their home without leaving any trace. (The absence of evidence of a break-in led the police to suspect her.) This passage confirms her skill and intelligence and foreshadows her ability to stay ahead of police until she is ready to stop running and let them find her at Cole’s apartment.

“The police had failed me once; there was no reason they wouldn’t fail me again.”

Jack’s distrust of the police is based on the behavior of Jeff’s police friends when Jack reported his abuse. The police had no interest in holding Jeff accountable in the past, and Malik has no interest in looking beyond Jack for suspects now. Malik is not malicious but rather stubborn to the point of incompetence. This character trope is common for the genre.

“I had shoplifted before […] because it made me feel…alive. In control. Predator, not prey.”

Jack struggles with control issues throughout the novel. Her parents died when she was young. This event seems to have prompted her to find ways to feel in control, to feel like she would not be a victim of circumstance again. Shoplifting gave her that sense of control, just as pen testing does now. Her relationship with Jeff made her feel like a victim, like the prey to his predator, whereas her marriage to Gabe was a step in the opposite direction. Neither she nor Gabe were predator or prey, but now he is gone, fallen prey to someone else. This line encapsulates Jack’s need for control to mitigate her sense of loss.

“He had a kind smile. I felt something inside me begin to crack.”

When Lucius Doyle pays for Jack’s hostel stay—after she endured 48 hours of hell at the hands of murderers and the police—his kindness is almost more than she can take. She felt something similar when her brother-in-law treated her with obvious concern. Kindness from a stranger is more than unexpected; it threatens the sense of control she needs to forge ahead.

“My only way out is through.”

Jack knows that if she returns to the police, she’ll be arrested for Gabe’s murder. She has little choice, then, but to find the murderer herself. This is, she tells Cole, the only path forward. The metaphor is not uncommon—life presents obstacles that one cannot avoid.

“Solve the next problem. And then the next one after that. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. Until you can’t walk any further.”

This passage expresses Jack’s strategy for surviving her grief and finding Gabe’s killer. She speaks metaphorically, equating physical steps with the mental steps to solve the murder. Her use of “further” rather than “farther” indicates that she is more overwhelmed by the intangible obstacles rather than her physical injuries, as “further” often describes figurative distances and “farther” is typically used for literal ones.

“Something steely inside me was already gathering my muscles, preparing me to pull myself up and continue walking […] This was something […] very deep, close to the core of me. It was the hard, indomitable part of me that refused to give in to the grief of Gabe’s death—at least for now.”

Jack senses a part of herself, some strength she possesses, that not only allows but also compels her to carry on. She does not yet know she is pregnant, but Gabe’s child is close to her core in a literal way. In order to keep him alive through their child, Jack must keep herself alive.

“I didn’t know why I didn’t want to tell [Cole] my thoughts. I only knew that what I was about to do was dangerous, and I didn’t want anyone pouring cold water over the idea before it was even half formed.”

Jack’s intuition tells her that something is wrong and she ought not tell Cole about her plan to visit Sunsmile Insurance to learn about Gabe’s policy. Although Cole just kissed her inappropriately, she does not suspect him of involvement in Gabe’s murder. However, something inside speaks to her, and she listens—to her benefit.

“I mean, […] even if you accept all the rest—Gabe going to Cole, then putting the exploit on the market, and then being set up by the people he’s dealing with—how does Cole get wind of Gabe’s life being in danger? From what Cole says, even Gabe didn’t know. So how did Cole see it coming?”

Once Jack contacts the real Hel, her sister finds holes in Cole’s story. The biggest is that he would not have known that Gabe was in danger unless he had been told by the killers. This “a-ha!” moment leads to more realizations about what happened between Gabe and Cole in the days prior to Gabe’s murder.

“I moved away down the carriage, feeling my face flame with […] the shame at the person I had turned into—a person who spat into the face of concerned strangers, who couldn’t trust the smallest kindness. Who was I becoming? I was no longer sure.”

Early on, Jack is moved by the kindness of strangers; however, the more physically and mentally depleted she becomes, the more suspicious she is of people who seem interested in her. She is a fugitive and memorable due to her gaunt appearance and feverish shaking, and she’s fearful of being recognized. When she yells at an elderly woman for expressing concern on the train, Jack feels ashamed and worries that she is changing—permanently—for the worse, as Jeff suggested.

“I thought of Lucius at the hostel, of the burger van owner, of the woman on the train, of all the people who had helped someone they didn’t know, with no prospect of anything back but thanks. Gabe’s death had brought me close to the worst of humankind—but there were still good people out there, people like Bill, making it hard to despair completely.”

This line touches on two of the most important themes of the text: the Deceptiveness of Appearances and the Kindness of Strangers. Jack thought she could rely on Cole to help her, but she was deceived by his appearance of friendship. Jack has also been helped—crucially—by good people who acted only out of concern for her. Here, she reflects on Bill Watts, the truck driver who gives her a ride to the service station to meet Madrox.

“This was my last roll of the dice—every penny I had, my last remaining bargaining chip.”

Jack uses gambling metaphors to describe using the last of Gabe’s savings to pay for the burner phone that has been swapped with Gabe’s number. It is a gamble: She assumes he made a backup of his files, but she’s not certain. After trading Gabe’s savings, she has no resources to fall back on, like a gambler who only has one more chance to roll a winner.

“But I didn’t know how to put it into words, what [Mike had] done for me, what he’d saved me from. ‘You’re a lifesaver.’ Maybe literally, if that exploit was being used for the kinds of things I suspected.”

Jack experiences kindness from a stranger who gives her a lift back to London after her meeting with Madrox. Mike Rake’s kindness allows Jack to escape the police who are searching the service station, to confront Cole, and to expose Cole’s cybercrime to the public and police.

“For the first time since Gabe’s death, I realized, something actually was [good news] […] And suddenly I was very hungry indeed.”

Throughout the novel, Jack ponders how alone she is without Gabe and how hopeless she is without the promise of their shared future. When Jack learns of her pregnancy, her hope is restored, and she is able to eat, finally. Her desire to eat symbolizes her desire to live, whereas before she didn’t care what happened to her in Gabe’s absence.