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.