On September 11, 2001, a businessman at the World Trade Center is called to retrieve a colleague's papers ten floors below his office and thus escapes the destruction of the plane smashing into the tower. Out on the street he abruptly decides to let everyone believe he is dead-and thus becomes "The New Man." Crossing the river into New Jersey, chance finds him in a Muslim neighborhood. Over the condensed surrealness of the week's upheaval, he meets twin Iraqi shop owners, an Iranian woman who claims to be the wife of the one of the Saudi hijackers, an Egyptian psychiatrist who is an amateur astronomer, and a former double of bin Laden (who did indeed have one). In an America abruptly forced to confront the Muslim world, the 9/11 survivor discovers his coworker's papers contain intelligence links to America's operations among the jihadists that had sent their fury into the heart of New York that September morning.