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

“Yeah,” Fat Thug said, “and if they got this far, there’d be a lot of activity.”


“Wait a minute. I’ve got two bars of a signal on my cell phone, and he’s waiting for a call.”


“What’re you gonna do? Call him and say the fuckers got away? He’s not expecting to hear from us for another couple of hours.”


“Okay,” Fat Thug said, “let’s double back and check the road in the other direction.”


They retraced their route and, when the pavement turned to gravel, followed it all the way to a dead end high up on the mountain. “Well,” Skinny Thug said, “no sign of them this way either.”


“Let’s go back to the house and see if we can find a trail leading behind it,” Fat Thug said.


“Aren’t we gonna make that call?”


“Not until I’m sure we can’t find those little fuckers,” Fat Thug said.


Back at the little house, they walked around behind it and started to make their way through the trees. Ten minutes later, Fat Thug said, “Look at that.”


Chapter 30