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

“Aren’t you worried about the bad guys being around?” I said.


“Not particularly, and even if they are, they’re not going to be looking for a party of six men and a little boy,” George said. “Why don’t we go see if Uncle Cyrus is home, Mike?”


“Yeah,” Mike said, “before we go tramping around his pasture, we ought to clear it with him.”


“We’re referring to Cyrus Hall,” George said. “We call him Mr. Hall to his face, but he’s an uncle of our friend Lucinda, and she introduced him as Uncle Cyrus.”


“Yeah,” Mike said. “If it hadn’t been for her introduction, he’d never have sold us the strip of land upstream from the cabin. It had been in his family for a few generations.”


“And don’t be fooled by his ‘good old boy’ persona,” George said. “Underneath that cornpone exterior is a shrewd old man.”


Chapter 46