"I should be dead. Buried in an unmarked grave in Romania. Obviously, I am not. God had other plans."

At just under five feet tall, Virginia Prodan was no match for the towering six-foot-ten-inch, gun-wielding assassin the Romanian government sent to her office to take her life. It was not the first time her life had been threatened—nor would it be the last.

As a young attorney under Nicolae Ceausescu's brutal communist regime,