Free Day of Doom by David Baldacci Page A

something useful, like maim someone? Oh, and tell that thickheaded brother of yours that if he screws up again like he did in Switzerland, there won’t be enough left of him to put in a tablespoon.”
    “Sorry to hear about your being poisoned,” Cheyenne said snidely.
    Isabel smiled imperiously. “You didn’t really believe that rubbish, did you?” She held up her arm, revealing the ugly mass. She rubbed at it with a cloth she took from her pocket. The colors from the mass came off on the cloth.
    “Works great for Halloween parties,
    too,” she said icily.
    “You are one cold woman.”

    “Well, cold beats warmth every time.
    And don’t ever forget it.”
    The screen went black.

The Chicago Limited train pulled out of Union Station in Washington, DC, with along groan of metal wheels on metal rails. The train was packed because, ironicallyenough in the twenty-first century, with allflights grounded, the train was proving theonly   real   option   left   to   coverexceptionally long distances. Few peoplewanted to spend a solid week drivingthemselves across the country. Indeed,

    Amtrak had added more cars to allow forthe sudden demand to ride the rails instead
    of the not-so-friendly skies.
    Dan and Amy were sharing one sleeper compartment while Jake and Atticus were rooming together in another. Dan sat glumly in his little seat, staring out the window. He checked his cell phone. Reception was spotty. He keyed his laptop, tried to get on the Internet. He succeeded, and then when they went through a tunnel, he lost the connection. He sighed and looked at Amy.
    “This sucks,” he said.
    “What does?”
    “I feel like I’m back in the nineteenth
    century. What do we take after the train, a
    stagecoach?”
    “It is what it is, Dan,” replied Amy.

    “And need I remind you that the train was
    your   idea?”
    “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
    Amy looked back down at the book she was reading.
    “Is that chick lit?” asked Dan sullenly.
    “And what if it is?” she shot back.
    “The world is about to end and
    you’re reading about guys and girls and sappy love stories?”
    She held up the book. “It’s actually a book on subduction zones and their
    geological makeup. I found it in the science section of the train station bookstore. So no sappy love stories required.”
    Dan’s face flushed and he looked
    away. “Good, okay, just checking.”

    Amy shook her head and went backto reading.
    Dan’s cell phone vibrated. When helooked down his heart nearly stopped. Hequickly glanced up to see if his sister hadheard the vibration, but she still wasreading her book.
    Dan quietly picked up the phone andread the text that had just dropped in hismailbox. It was from his father. Dan hadbeen getting a series of these. It was hisonly thread of hope that his father had notperished in the fire with Dan’s mother, Hope Cahill. But it was not as simple asthat. While Dan wanted to believe that hisfather was a good man and loved hischildren, he was far from convinced thiswas the case. In fact, part of Dansuspected his father of being Vesper One.

    If he was alive, that meant he had escapedfrom the fire Isabel Kabra had set. If he
    had escaped, that meant he had left his wife —  their mother —  to die in the
    flames. That was unforgivable.
    Arthur Trent had been a nonlinear dynamics   and  quantum  field  theory professor. Dan had no real idea what that meant, but he assumed one had to be pretty smart to teach it. His father also had been a Vesper, although he had thought it was just a cool secret society and not the source of global menace. He had dropped out of West Point and been given the assignment of tracking down Hope Cahill and making her fall in love with him. But Arthur had learned some awful things about the Vespers by then. And the other thing was, he’d fallen in love with Dan’s

    mother. For real. Renouncing the Vespers, he and