Spoiler Discussion for Zero Days

Have you read Zero Days by Ruth Ware and need to talk about the plot, the characters, or the ending? Need some spoilers for Zero Days? I am here for you. Join my Spoiler Discussion of Zero Days!

Table of Contents: Spoiler Discussion for Zero Days

Character List for Zero Days by Ruth Ware

Plot Summary of Zero Days

What is the Ending of Zero Days by Ruth Ware

Spoiler Discussion for Zero Days by Ruth Ware

Character List for Zero Days by Ruth Ware

Jacinta “Jack” Cross: co-owner of Crossways Security.

Gabriel Medway: Jack’s husband, who owns Crossways with her.

Helena Wick: Jack’s sister, a journalist

Roland Wick: Jack’s brother-in-law, a solicitor (British lawyer).

Cole Garrick: Gabe’s best friend who works for Cerberus, a tech firm.

Julian Archer: friend of Gabe’s 

Noeme: Cole’s model girlfriend

Lucius Doyle: American tourist at the hostel

Jim Cauldwell: CISO (chief information security officer) of Arden Alliance

John and Verity Medway: Gabe’s parents

Police Officers

Jeff Leadbetter: Ex-boyfriend of Jack; controlling and emotionally abusive when they were together

Detective Constable Alex Miles

Detective Sergeant Habiba Malik

PC Sanjay Williams: arresting officer at Arden Alliance

Plot Summary for Zero Days

Sat Feb 4

Late one night, Jacinta “Jack” Cross  and her husband Gabe Medway are conducting a Penetration Test on an insurance group called Arden Alliance.

Jack physically breaks into the company offices and tries to access their digital systems. At home, Gabe is providing tech support.

Sun Feb 5

Jack is caught by a security guard in the act. Because Arden Alliance doesn’t answer the phone and vouch for her, she’s taken to the local police station around 2 am. She tries to contact Gabe by phone but he doesn’t respond. 

Jack is released by police. She takes an Uber back to Arden Alliance, where she left her car.  When she arrives home around 4 am, she finds Gabe dead, his throat cut. After sitting in shock for some time, she calls the police.

The police are confused by Jack’s timeline, by the length of time it took her to call the police, and by the fact that her phone was switched off while she was driving home and until she called 999.

The police take Jack’s phone into evidence and drive her to her sister Helena’s house. Helena tells Jack that Gabe’s death seems like a contract killing. Helena and her husband Roland urge Jack to get a lawyer. 

Jack mentions that Gabe had been in prison for hacking when he was a teenager. 

Mon Feb 6

The police want to speak to Jack again. Before heading to the station, she tries to call Gabe’s parents. They don’t pick up but she does reach Cole, Gabe’s best friend.

The police tell Jack they can’t make her timeline work. She left the police station at 2 am, took an Uber back to Arden Alliance, which was 45 minutes away, then drove home. But she didn’t call the police until 5 am.

Jack tells the police that Gabe must have been dead by 2 am, because he didn’t answer his phone when she tried to reach him. When the police ask about Gabe’s missing hard drive and a kitchen knife, Jack tells them she wants a lawyer. 

While she’s waiting for her lawyer, Jack checks her email and finds a strange message confirming an insurance policy on her husband. She’s the beneficiary of the policy, but she didn’t know about it,. Panicked that she is being framed, she uses her break-in skills to flee the police station.

Jack heads by taxi to her home, which is being guarded by a police officer. She slips in the back, through an open bathroom window, the way she thinks Gabe’s attacker must have entered the house. 

Jack grabs her “go bag” for jobs, which has a spare laptop, a lock pick, and some disguises. She grabs the book The Glass Key, in which Gabe has written his Bitcoin codes. Then she flees when she hears the police outside, looking for her. 

While waiting to meet her sister Helena at a shopping center, Jack wonders if Gabe could have bought the insurance policy himself. She also realizes that she cut herself while climbing over her neighbor’s fence.

Jack checks into a hostel and bleaches her bright red hair. Jeff has sent her an email suggesting she turn herself in. 

She emails back, reminding him that he stalked her after they broke up.

I feel like this American tourist who paid Jack’s hostel fee is going to pop back up later.

Tues Feb 7

Jack meets with Cole to brief him. She mentions that Gabe’s hard drive is missing. Cole sets up a secure messaging app on Jack’s phone offers up his girlfriend’s cottage in Rye as a place to stay. Jack disguises herself as a pregnant woman and takes the train to Rye.

Jack asks Hel to help her investigate the insurance policy. Hel asks Jack if she thinks Jeff could have killed Gabe. After they broke up, Jeff had made sure Jack had fake speeding tickets and even set up a drug bust at her house. 

Hmmm I’m getting the feeling that the person Jack is texting is NOT Helena. Cole set up the Signal app on her phone and used a burner number, which I bet he has access to.

Wed Feb 8

Jack can’t figure out how to get the electricity to work at the cottage. Cole arrives, bringing food and a portable charger. They discuss the insurance policy and how to find out who set it up. Was it Jeff? 

Cole makes a pass at her and she rebuffs him. He’s concerned about her injury.

Thurs Feb 9

Jack wakes up and realizes the police are outside the cottage. She makes a quick escape out the back. She decides to break into the insurance company and trolls social media for an employee she can impersonate. 

Jack gets into an employee’s email and finds Gabe’s, complete with his drivers license and credit card number. The one clue is a strange phone number.  There’s also a recorded call, supposedly with Gabe, from three days before his death. But the person on the recording isn’t him. It’s Cole.

Yes, Jack just figured out that the person she’s texting is Cole!

She calls Cole, who claims he was just trying to keep her safe. He says Gabe discovered a big zero day exploit, a way to hack into a system. Instead of reporting it to the developer, he decided to sell it on the dark web. But someone came after him and took it.

She jumps off the train as it stops between stations.

Jack calls her sister. She thinks it might be true that Gabe stumbled on a vulnerability, but she doesn’t believe he tried to sell it.

Helena points out that for Cole to have bought the insurance policy on Feb 1, he would have had to know Gabe was in danger then. But Gabe didn’t even seem to know. Helena thinks Cole was the dirty one. Me too, Helena. I mean, who else?

Fri Feb 10

Jack decides she needs to track down the zero day exploit herself. But to do that she needs Gabe’s phone (which is at the police station) to get around two-step verification. She calls Jeff and asks for his help. He agrees to meet her in London at Piccadilly Circus.

Jack sends Helena in her place and Jeff arrests her. 

Sat Feb 11

Jack hitches a ride with a trucker to meet a stranger to (I think) buy a clone of Gabe’s phone. Because the value of Gabe’s Bitcoin just dropped, she also has to give the buyer her engagement ring to pay for the cloned phone. Finally she’s able to use the phone for the two-step verification to get into his hard drive.

She was right: the flaw was in Cole’s security app, Watchdog, and its related kid-monitoring app, Puppydog. Because of this flaw, those who used the app could have had their privacy compromised. People like journalists and political dissidents.

Gabe’s cloned phone rings. It’s DS Malik, who offers to send a patrol car to pick Jack up. 

Instead, Jack hitches another ride back to London and heads to Cole’s flat. She posts about the security vulnerability on social media, urging everyone to ask Cerberus to fix the exploit.

At Cole’s building, she goes to the roof and jumps down to his balcony, despite the pain in her side. The door from the balcony is locked, but with her tools she’s able to jimmy it open.

Who Was Responsible for Gabe’s Death and Why?

Cole wakes up and threatens to shoot Jack. She tells him to check his phone and he sees all the aftermath of what she posted about the app exploit.

Cole says that when he started at Cerberus, he was approached by people who said they were government agents

He’s furious and packing his things as he talks.

Cole tells her that Gabe “went poking around” and then when Gabe found the Cerberus app exploits, he refused to let Cole deal with it, (which I assume means hush it up.) Gabe also wouldn’t take a payoff to keep quiet about it. He wanted to tell Cerberus so they could fix it, rather than let sketchy people continue to take advantage of it.

Jack asks who killed Gabe, and Cole says he doesn’t know. Men who claimed to be government agents, but who knows.

Jack suggests that Cole turn himself in. (I found this a little ironic since she’s been on the run the entire book).

She follows him down to the lobby, where she hears sirens. As the police arrest Jack, she passes out from the pain.

Monday Feb 13

Jack dreams of Gabe, but wakes up in hospital with Helena at her bedside. She had a ruptured (lacerated?) spleen as a result of her injury, and that had to be removed.

DS Malik arrives and says that Cole was arrested and faces serious charges, some under the Computer Misuse Act and possible counterrorism and espionage.

Jack learns she’s pregnant.

One year later:

Jack is on another job. She’s at a police station, pretending to be an officer. She’s doing a penetration test for the police. Habiba Malik pops up and tells Jack that Cole Garrick has died in jail. Jack wonders if he was murdered. 

Jack reflects that the hackers (who presumably were behind Gabe’s death) were just “part of a vast dark web f unseen players, a network that encompassed everyone from national security agencies to organizations like the Lazarus Group.”

Gabe’s killers had been found floating in the Thames that past summer. DS Malik also says that Jeff has been fired for misconduct.

Spoiler Discussion for Zero Days by Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware really has a book for everyone, from Modern Gothics to Locked Room Mysteries to Dark Academia to this book, a female-forward action thriller.

I really enjoyed this one. Jack was a fun main character (very different from Ware’s last main character, the pregnant detective Hannah). I liked Hannah, but many of you did not.

The mystery in Zero Days wasn’t really a solvable. Jack says that she considers Cole responsible, even if the unnamed mysterious shadowy network actually ordered the hit. But the people ultimately responsible for Gabe’s death aren’t brought to justice.

Check out my review of Zero Days as there is some exciting movie news there!

Please leave all your thoughts and questions in comments, and if you can answer any of my (or someone else’s) questions, please do!