Joe Slade grew up on a hardscrabble farm in poverty and ignorance. He was expected to leave school and make moonshine for the Slades. He became a skillful Lacrosse player and got a scholarship to Duke University. He worked at a resort hotel and made friends there with a man who was the leader in exile of the Catalan party for independence from Spain. Joe learned Spanish and Catalan and visited Barcelona where he found his first real home and loving family While working as an investor and becoming rich, he met and fell in love with a Catalan girl. They were in Paris she was killed in a terrorist attack that he barely survived while trying to save her. Devastated by the loss of the love of his life Joe started to obsess about revenge on the terrorists.