Steve Panailla, journalist and young new member of a news team, is trying to get home for Christmas following his first experience recording the violence of war. As he waits in a rundown airport for a flight back, the group leader gives him a manuscript to read in order to pass the time--The Smallest Angel.
In the story, Steve reads about Nishka, a strange and beautiful woman created through a secret research project in the Soviet Union, who is now free after her creator had attempted to sell her to a terrorist organization. Escaping, she eventually moves to a midwestern town, where she meets widower David Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Jessica. As Nishka befriends them, she learns what it means to be human and to have people who care. But when Jessica writes an award-winning paper, Nishka finds her cover blown and terrorists once again coming after her--and threatening everything she loves. As Steve spends hours in the airport engaged in the adventures of Nishka, David and Jessica, he has no idea what truths the story will reveal to him.
In this story within a story, a journalist reads a manuscript telling the tale of experimental Soviet saboteur, the family she finds, and the power of love and miracles in the lives of ordinary people.