A wealthy middle-aged man at the airport witnesses a tiny incident involving an unknown, perhaps Arab, young man and airport staff. After the young man is confronted directly at the airport toilets, he feels himself subject to an indefinable but increasingly serious sense of danger. The fear of the evil that had, as it were, encircled the man since then, gradually becomes an obsession. The urgent desire to see the evil, to confront it and destroy it.
After being expelled from Beecher Prep for his treatment of a classmate with a facial deformity, Julian has struggled to fit in at his new school. To transform his life, Julian's grandmother finally reveals her own story of courage of her youth in Nazi-occupied France, where a classmate shelters her from mortal danger.