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Though he said he aspired to an economics degree, Binalshibh studied almost not at all. Those who knew him described him as “in love with life … charming … very funny, made lots of jokes.” All the same, he shared Atta’s traits. At classes, he objected to the sight of women wearing blouses that showed cleavage. He thought that “disgusting.” What distracted Binalshibh during math lessons, a fellow student recalled, was reading the Qur’an under the desk. He was more cheerful about his religion than Atta, to be sure, but faith was at the core of his being.

So it was, too, for a newcomer who was to become Atta’s constant companion. Marwan al-Shehhi, just eighteen when he arrived from the United Arab Emirates, was the son of a muezzin—the man who called the faithful to prayer at the mosque in his hometown. In his teen years, before his father’s recent death, he had sometimes had the task of switching on the prayer tape for his father.

Friends would remember Shehhi as “a regular guy,” like Binalshibh “happy … always laughing and telling one joke after another,” “dreamy … slightly spoiled.” Spoiled not least because, after just six months in the military, he had been sent off to study marine engineering in Europe on an army scholarship of $4,000 a month. Happy perhaps, but—an echo of Atta and Binalshibh—he could “explode” with anger on “seeing a male friend looking at a woman.” Shehhi never actually spoke to women unless he had to.

Probably thanks to his father the muezzin, Shehhi could recite Islamic texts on cue. Even at his tender age he yearned for the pleasures of Paradise, imagined himself sitting in the shade on the bank of a broad river flowing with honey. Binalshibh, for his part, would exclaim, “What is this life good for? The Paradise is much nicer.” To these young men, heaven was no distant concept or possible consolation for the inevitability of death, but a real destination of choice.

The fourth man in the group, who arrived the same month as Shehhi, at first seems not to fit the pattern. Ziad Jarrah, who flew in with his cousin, had grown up in cosmopolitan Lebanon. The son of a well-to-do civil servant and a mother who worked as a French teacher, he had interesting relatives. A great-uncle, it would be reported after 9/11, had been recruited by a department of the former East Germany that handled espionage—and by Libyan intelligence. A cousin, according to The New York Times in 2009, confessed to having long spied for Israel—while posing as a supporter of the Palestinian cause.

If such odd details impinge not at all on Jarrah’s own story, other factors marked him out. Though his family was Sunni Muslim, he had been sent to the best Christian schools. He had regularly skipped prayers, shown no special interest in religion, and was no stranger to alcohol. “Once,” said Salim, the cousin who traveled to Germany with him, “we drank so much beer we couldn’t go straight on a bike.”

Jarrah enjoyed partying, thought the nightclubs in Europe tame compared to what he was used to in Lebanon—and he liked girls. When he met a strikingly lovely young Turkish woman, within weeks of arriving in Germany, he rapidly won her away from a current boyfriend. He and Aysel Sengün became lovers, beginning an on-off affair that was to endure until his death on 9/11.

For all that, and within months of his arrival, the twenty-two-year-old Jarrah also got religion—and a measure of political fervor he had never evinced before. Perhaps someone got to him during an early trip home to Lebanon, for it was when he got back that cousin Salim first noticed him reading a publication about jihad. Perhaps it was the influence of a young imam in Germany—himself a student—who badgered people he knew to attend the mosque, and pressed anyone who would listen to donate to Palestinian causes. The imam was suspected, the CIA would say later, of having “terrorist connections.”

What is clear is that something happened to Jarrah that changed him, changed his directions. Aysel Sengün, herself a Muslim but of moderate bent, was troubled