Summary

The prologue to Jonathan Dee's novel begins on September 11, 2001 in New York City, and that day's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center are the section's backdrop. The unnamed narrator lives in the city and works in a laboratory at Columbia University. On the day of the attacks, he is scheduled to meet with a lawyer named Greg Towles, who is trying to put together a class action lawsuit against a financial advisor named Garrett Spalding, who has swindled the narrator out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The narrator won the money in a settlement after being run down by a city bus, and Spalding defrauded him of that money online.

When the narrator showed up at Towles' office on the day of the attacks, he was told the firm was closed for the day. He came back the next morning, and in...