On Saturday, May 1, 1915, Dora shivers on the Cunard dock in New York. The Germans have printed a warning in the newspaper trying to scare Americans away from the Lusitania. Her parents and the other first-class passengers scoff at such uncivilized scare tactics. But that very night at dinner the waiter delivers her a note under glass. A stranger signed Doom orders her to come to the first-class lounge at midnight.

The man pulls a gun on her. She barely escapes with her life. The next day she bumps into a fellow passenger who was assaulted for catching the saboteur in the engine room playing with an incendiary bomb. The Lusitania sinks on May 7 after a mysterious second explosion.

Even in the English countryside at Ware House, Dora cannot escape the killer. He trashes her room as he trashed her cabin on the ship. Her fiancé disappears on a secret mission to the Arabian Desert. He is followed by assassins as she is being hunted down back home in Pittsburgh. As a friend comments to her, It s a World War, isn t it?

Dora must sift through clues everything from an antique humidor, to a girl behind veils hiding in a house in London who conceals valuables in her bookcase, to cryptic Hittite script on the bottom of a box, to the elusive smile of a blond-haired, blue-eyed colonel wearing an Arab keffiyeh. Everything conspires to drive Dora to that fateful meeting in Paris in the spring of 1919 during the Peace Conference that makes her understand what four years of hard fighting has been about.

Those Who Dream By Day is the first of a two-part series entitled 2014 about the American Century 1914-2014. The second volume will soon be available from Cheops Books.