“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, traffic, three moving to your four o’clock, three miles northwest bound, altitude indicates 3,000 feet unverified, type unknown. I’m not talking to him.”

Off the Duck’s starboard wingtip, I caught the glint of sunlight reflecting from the twin propellers of what looked to be a Beech Baron, far enough away that there seemed little chance of the two of us scraping paint.

“Four Charlie Lima has the traffic in sight, no factor,” I said.

“Four Charlie Lima, thank you. Maintain visual separation from that traffic.”

“Roger.”

Just to be on the safe side, I had Dragomir turn left twenty degrees. The Baron appeared to parallel our turn. I told Dragomir to turn twenty degrees more. The Baron turned as well. He was now less than two miles away and closing.

“You’ll need to schedule a flight physical with an FAA examiner before you can solo,” I said, keeping one eye on the twin. “Every licensed private pilot has to pass a medical exam at least every two years.”

Dragomir said he disliked physicians. “I had my appendix out two months ago. It still hurts,” he said, lifting his T-shirt to show me the scar. “Sometimes, I swear, it feels like there’s something still in there.”

I’m not paranoid. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re an ex-government operative and that your former co-worker, a fellow operative, has been savagely murdered. Let’s say individuals unknown are leaving hang-up calls on your answering machine and, by all indications, stalking you. Let’s say that your former contact in Russian intelligence has turned up on the coroner’s slab, implanted with a radio-controlled explosive device that can be detonated from as far away as a half-mile. And let’s say that some college kid who hails from a former Soviet republic shows up out of seemingly nowhere with oddly innate piloting skills, and hands you a check issued by a financial institution that caters to the very individuals you once hunted. Let’s say he discloses that he was recently operated on, and that, sometimes, it feels like there’s something still in there. Let’s also say that a twin-engine aircraft easily fifty knots an hour faster than your plane is angling directly toward you, and that you’ve suddenly convinced yourself that the kid sitting beside you with the surgical scar on his belly has been unwittingly implanted with a bomb identical to the one they found inside your Russian friend, and that if that other airplane gets within a half-mile of you, that bomb will detonate.

Under similar circumstances, any prudent pilot would’ve done exactly what I did: initiate air combat maneuvers.

“I have the plane,” I said.

“You don’t want me to fly?”

“Eugen, take your hands off the fucking yoke!”

Eugen Dragomir relinquished the control wheel like it was diseased.

In a Cessna 172, a roll is ordinarily something you eat, not do. But this was no ordinary situation. I rolled the Duck inverted and executed a descending half-loop, reversing course before rolling out wings level on a 180-degree divergent bearing. Your standard split-S Dog Fighting 101. The Baron pilot was having none of it. When I looked back over my right shoulder, he was banking steeply, still a couple of miles off, angling once more toward the Duck’s tail.

I dialed up the emergency frequency, 121.5, on my numberone radio and called air traffic control.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Cessna Four Charlie Lima is under attack.”

The only response was static. I smacked the audio panel and tried it again. This time, there was no static. There was no nothing. The radio was dead.

Dragomir was looking over at me wide-eyed, like it was all way more than he’d bargained for.

“Under attack? What the fuck, dude!”

I was too preoccupied to offer any immediate explanations.

We were never going to outrun a twin-engine Baron. That much I knew. The Duck literally was a sitting duck. There was only one way out: threaten the safety of the Vice President of the United States.

By the time the two F-16’s intercepted us and ordered me to land via the rocking of their missile-laden wings, the Baron had vanished. Secret Service agents in suits and armed with Belgium-made submachine-pistols were waiting on the tarmac at the Rancho Bonita Airport as we touched down. They handcuffed Dragomir and me, searched the Duck for weapons, then drove us in a black Chevy Suburban with darkly tinted windows past a burgeoning phalanx of news crews to the airport’s security office. The agents seemed little interested in hearing how I had no choice but to violate the Vice President’s temporary no-fly zone or risk getting blown out of the sky by the mysterious Beech Baron. I was accused of having imagined the threat. They laughed when I shared with them my fanciful work history, just as Czarnek and his partner had done.

Radar tracks confirmed that, in fact, there had been another private plane flying in my vicinity, but at no time had it posed a hazard significant enough to warrant my intentionally busting a TFR, the agents insisted. The Baron was traced to a Camarillobased cardiologist who’d become distracted while trying to familiarize himself with a state-of-the-art GPS navigation system newly installed on his airplane, which explained his erratic flying.

It was well past sundown before the lead agent, an energetic African-American woman named Rachel Fargas, grew weary of grilling me and let me go — but only after I surrendered my pilot’s license to her. She told me that officials from the FAA and U.S. Attorney’s office would be in touch to discuss possible criminal actions. The good news, Fargas said, was that the Secret Service would not divulge my name to the press as a matter of fairness until such time as any actual charges were filed.

“What about my student?”

“You were pilot in command. As far as we’re concerned, the student was just along for the ride,” Fargas said. “We released him two hours ago.”

The news media was gone by the time I was let go. I walked to Larry’s hangar, unlocked the door, and dropped off my flight bag inside my office, suddenly feeling very exhausted. The light was flashing on my answering machine. There were three messages: one from some attorney representing Savannah’s father who asked that I return his call at my earliest convenience; one from Eugen Dragomir saying he still wanted to go flying with me, assuming neither one of us went to prison; and one from my landlady.

“I just wanted to let you know,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “that somebody threw a bomb in your apartment. But don’t worry, Bubeleh. We’re still having brisket Monday night.”

My first thoughts when notified that my apartment had been torched were of Kiddiot’s welfare. OK, that’s not entirely correct.

In truth, my first thoughts were, “Gee, I hope all my stuff didn’t burn up because I really can’t afford to buy all new stuff right now,” followed by, “Gee, I wonder who did it?” Not that I didn’t concern myself with the safety of my ungrateful, indifferent feline roommate. But I figured that if anybody could survive a firebombing, like a cockroach, it was him. He’d probably slept through the whole thing up in his tree.

I pulled up and parked Savannah’s Jaguar in front of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house. “Your kitty’s A-OK,” she said as she met me outside. “I made some tuna noodle casserole for him. Does he eat any of it? Not a bite. He’s on the divan, taking a nap. He was exhausted.”

“You’d be exhausted, too, Mrs. Schmulowitz, if you slept twenty-two hours a day.”

I asked Mrs. Schmulowitz if she was A-OK. She assured me she was. She’d been down at the beach, going for a run, she said, when the fire apparently broke out. An eighty-nine-year-old woman jogging along the sand in Lycra shorts and a sports bra. I wondered how many tourists took pictures.