Wonder what it is like to get shot in the head? Cormac O’Doyle doesn’t remember it happening, but afterward, it was not a pleasant experience. He was out enjoying his thrice weekly exercise; running up a very steep hill, way out in the Virginia countryside. Things are now looking up for the retired soldier; soon to be married to a gorgeous wife with a brilliant new job in the offing. Life couldn’t get any better. He gets to the top, gasping, sucking air like a jet engine, bends over to get his breath, looks up to admire the view, then wakes up in hospital, four weeks later. He lies there thinking, then does some self-exploration. He soon realizes it’s his head, and when the doctor arrives, he confirms he’s been shot. The bullet hit just above his ear and exited out through the top of his skull, shattering it, and he now has a steel plate inserted. It was his bending down to get his breath that saved him. He should have been killed.

Then the FBI arrive, two agents, John Chambers and Helen Carson. Despite only just coming around, he is stunned that he knows “Agent Babe,” Helen Carson. Somehow, while he was unconscious, he had struck up a relationship with Helen, one he now has no knowledge of, other than he instinctively knows that she and him have talked to each other while he was supposedly unconscious. But his memory is desperately faulty; he remembers virtually nothing of his previous life. The doctor informs him that his partner had arrived when he was first admitted; heard the grim prognosis and had not bothered to come back. He knew instinctively she was gone and a simple check of their accounts show she had cleaned out the account she had access to.

But he knows Helen likes him. She informs him that he has been the target of a scheme, where for a fee, the removal of those that stand in the way of someone getting the job they want is possible. He was in the way, and for the killers to get paid, they will now have to come back and finish the job. The FBI has to protect him, and that means Agent Babe has to now stay with him at his flat. Helen soon learns that Cormac is more than just a retired soldier; and she learns that as a soldier, while employed by the military, out in the battle field, he sometimes worked behind enemy lines, doing tasks the CIA needed done.

Then the killers arrive to finish the job, and she sees first-hand the skills of Cormac O’Doyle. They are brutal and ultimately lethal, but his memory is way to slow in coming back. Cormac knows he needs time and space to heal. He leaves, and heads to his fishing home in the West Virginia mountains. Helen is heartbroken, but she also knows he needs that time and distance away from the killers who want him dead.

Peter Callan is an ex-Force Recon Marine, now retired, working for a well-respected Economics Professor Amal Carmody, working first as his protection, and second in aiding at small venues they initially presented at. They both know he needs a bigger audience; then Peter comes up with an idea that exponentially expands the size of the audience. The professor’s message is simple; it is dedicated to revealing the truth about the Neo-Liberal Economics theory that America has run on from the time of Ronald Regan. He shows how the wealth that was supposed to ‘Trickle Down’ under the Neo liberal economic theory of Milton Friedman hasn’t. Instead, it has stayed in the hands of the elite rich who received it, and that has quietly impoverished the vast majority of the people in the United States. The Trickle-Down theory, the Professor shows in his lectures, has never worked and never will, and it has led to one of the worst imbalances of wealth in American History. The elite, and their rich political lackies, do not want their privileged lives to change; they want Professor Amal Carmody stopped!

The question is how?