It's a stunningly eventful day in the life of Eric Packer, a multi-billionaire who owns a forty-eight-room apartment and a decommissioned nuclear bomber and who has recently married the heiress of a vast European fortune. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across the middle of Manhattan, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding through town, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups.

Eric's bodyguards are worried that he is a target and, indeed, he is - although the danger, as it turns out, is not from the protesters or political assassins, but from an anonymous man who lives in an abandoned building.