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

“Not enough to make a difference. I think there were something like twenty-seven copies sold of my last book, and I’m almost certain that my mother bought twenty-five of them.”


“Surely you exaggerate,” he said with a smile.


“Only a little. Obscure tomes on obscure topics are hardly the stuff of best sellers. At best, they wind up gathering dust on forgotten shelves in libraries.”


“Point taken,” he said. “So what are you going to do now?”


“Now we wait. Because of Col. Richardson’s Pentagon connection, we’re going to see if someone in the intelligence community will look into this matter for us. I just wanted you to know that if an apparently incriminating photograph of myself somehow lands in your mailbox, there’s more to the story than meets the eye.”


“The best defense being a good offense,” he said.


“Just so,” I said, thinking, Especially when dealing with Jesuits


Chapter 8