Iran's tyranny grips two escaped refugees: one who saves lives and one a cold-blooded killer, with the destiny of both in one woman's hands.Dr. David Badalian, a Christian anesthesiologist left Iran owing them for military service, so looking over his shoulder isn't new. His lifelong focus is America. Elated, he flies from Frankfort, Germany to Chicago where Rush Presbyterian Hospital has invited him to train. Dr. Ava Sevani, a pediatric primary care/surgeon on the Heidelberg University medical campus and Badalian's pregnant fiancee plans to join him once he is settled. Ava refused to embroil Badalian in her estranged father's ridiculous warning that because of a misdealing with a powerful international political group, he is hiding in Canada and has inadvertently put a target on her back. Badalian arrives at O'Hare where he is kidnapped by a man he helped bury years ago in Iran. Elias Hekmat threatens Badalian with export back to Iran and death to his relatives if he refuses orders.Dirk Brown, the powerful pipeline magnate, has a sinister side. He is the treacherous rogue mercenary, Nail, whose goal is Iran's destruction as payback for his mother's stoning death and his simultaneous debilitating spinal injury when he refused to help kill her. Nail/Brown guts his own pipeline from Canada through southern Illinois with the help of a desperate angry explosives expert bent on killing his ex-wife, and a genius electrical engineer with a fetish for women's secondhand pantyhose. Using "smartpigs" labeled Iran, Brown's plan is for implosion of the world economy and consequential actions by the U.S. and U.N. to obliterate his homeland. Ava is chased by killers across Germany and Canada, where she confronts her father only to join him as Brown's prisoner.Nail's/Brown's vulnerability is extreme pain that insults his integrity. He insists the principled Badalian, whose movements his men control, use his spinal injection expertise to relieve the intense pain so that he can face TV cameras with tenacity as he encourages catastrophic revenge on Iran. He plans to kill Badalian and win back his former lover, Ava Sevani.Their deadly clash is inevitable.