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

“I can’t tell you how pleased I am to learn that two of my students actually had what it takes to climb a mountain barefoot and in their skivvies in late December,” he said.


“It wasn’t really a mountain, Sir,” Sean said. “It was more like a ridge.”


I said, “Sean, don’t be modest—Sheriff Sutton said that ridge was at least five hundred feet high.”


“Taking refuge in a shed behind a cabin owned by a law-enforcement officer was just about the luckiest thing they could have done,” Randy said. “What we still don’t know is how the kidnappers knew about the boys’ change in travel plans. We didn’t know ourselves until the night before.”


“Did the security people find anything when they swept the school office for bugs?” I said.


“Did they ever!” he said. “The damn things were everywhere. One on my phone, one in the security office, one in the pay phone in the barracks, and there were even a couple of them on the trunk lines that feed our switchboard.”


Chapter 59