Professor and secret government analyst Ian Sanderson's bad day gets worse when he arrives home one miserable November evening to find an apparently incriminating photograph in a FedEx envelope in his doorway, followed by increasingly threatening photographs over the next two or three weeks. It isn't just Ian being set up: his partner, Randy, a lieutenant colonel working on a top-secret Pentagon project, is also at risk. Someone obviously wants something, but what? And from whom?<br><br> Soon, a mysterious caller demands that Randy disclose information about the project he's been working on. When he refuses, Ian's and Randy's sons, David and Paul, are kidnapped from an Amtrak passenger train. Resourceful and intelligent, the boys manage to escape-only to find themselves lost and alone in a remote wilderness. With time running out, can Ian and Randy track down their blackmailers? Or will the man known only as The Broker claim another set of victims?

The Burdens of Truth

As for Sean and Paul, they’d practically been raised together, even though we hadn’t always lived in the same city. And during the five years that Randy had worked at the Pentagon, the two boys had become virtually inseparable. As far as we could tell, the two of them had no difficulty getting used to sharing a room on a permanent basis. Paul had totally written his mother off as a lost cause, given that she’d made it clear when she left that her new life contained no place in it for a son, and he’d adjusted to that fact.


During that two-week period, we had a great time. We went for long hikes several times and even spent half a day following the Appalachian Trail, which passed through the area near our campsite. At an age when many teenage boys were beginning to drift apart from their parents as a sort of rite of passage, Sean and Paul were becoming closer than ever to us.


Chapter 7