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that.
    •   •   •
    After breakfast, Peter, Hattie, and Ben walked across the highway with their bags and put them into the rear of the Cayenne, then Peter went into the office to pay his bill.
    Teddy took his credit card and ran it, then Peter signed it.
    “Thanks for making this go so smoothly,” Peter said to him.
    “There’s something you should know,” Teddy said. He held up the little GPS transmitter. “I found this in the wheel well of your car. You were being tracked by someone.”
    Peter looked at it closely. “So we’re not crazy. We were all sure that we were being followed, and for a long time, too.”
    “You won’t be followed anymore,” Teddy said. “I had a brief conversation with two Russian gentlemen in a big black SUV, and they turned around and went back the way they came. You have any idea who they might be?”
    “My father had a problem with some Russians recently,” Peter said. “He told me to watch out for them.”
    “Your father was right—they were not nice people. Who is your father?”
    “His name is Stone Barrington. He’s a lawyer in New York.”
    Teddy knew that name; he had met the man on the island of St. Marks a few years back, and he had been in the company of Holly Barker, who was with the CIA. “Well, he’s a smart guy. Tell him about this, and listen to his advice.”
    Peter wrote down his cell number. “Billy, if you should find yourself in L.A., this is my number. We’re all going to be working at Centurion Studios. You seem like a very capable man, so if you’re ever looking for work out there, call me.”
    Teddy tucked the card into his pocket. “You never know,” he said.
    The two shook hands, and the young people got into the Cayenne and drove away.
    •   •   •
    Once on their way, Peter said, “You’re not going to believe what Billy Burnett just told me.” And he told them.

Teddy Fay waved off the kids in the Cayenne, then he went back inside and began to put the office and shops in good order, pending the return of Tom Fields after a few days off to see to his wife during her recovery. He was interrupted only a few times by cars stopping for gas, and by the arrival of Bobby after school. Teddy had already managed to broaden the range of the boy’s skills with cars, and he could see him becoming more confident in his judgments.
    Teddy found a few minutes to walk the few hundred feet to where he had buried the black SUV containing the bodies of its Russian operators. It had been windy during the night, and the site was not only undisturbed, but now invisible.
    He was walking back to the filling station when he heard the whistling of a turbine engine overhead. He looked up to see a single-engine airplane circling the filling station’s airstrip, much as he himself had done a couple of weeks before. Shortly, the aircraft turned on a final approach to the strip, but the pilot seemed to be having problems with setting the power for landing. He abandoned his first approach and went around, but continued to have problems with airspeed, rising and falling on approach. His landing was hard and barely controlled.
    Teddy waved him over to a parking spot and waited while the pilot took five minutes to get everything shut down as per the checklist. The airplane, he knew, was a late-model Piper Malibu Mirage that had been converted to a turboprop with the installation of a Pratt & Whitney jet engine turning a propeller. Teddy had read articles about it and had even ordered a brochure from the engine converters, JetPROP Aviation, in Spokane, Washington. He had considered buying one, but had never managed to make the decision.
    Finally, the pilot exited the airplane via the little airstair door, mopping his face with a handkerchief. “Shit!” he said, as he approached Teddy, his hand out. “That was a really shitty landing, wasn’t it?”
    “I’ve seen worse,” Teddy said, “but not much worse.”
    The man laughed. I’m Howard Strunk,”