Double Jeopardy (Stone Barrington #57)(66)
October 21, 2020
Washington Depot, Connecticut
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.
However, if you have access to the Internet, you may visit my website at www.stuartwoods.com, where there is a button for sending me e-mail. So far, I have been able to reply to all my e-mail, and I will continue to try to do so.
Remember: e-mail, reply; snail mail, no reply.
When you e-mail, please do not send attachments, as I never open these. They can take twenty minutes to download, and they often contain viruses.
Please do not place me on your mailing lists for funny stories, prayers, political causes, charitable fund-raising, petitions, or sentimental claptrap. I get enough of that from people I already know. Generally speaking, when I get e-mail addressed to a large number of people, I immediately delete it without reading it.
Please do not send me your ideas for a book, as I have a policy of writing only what I myself invent. If you send me story ideas, I will immediately delete them without reading them. If you have a good idea for a book, write it yourself, but I will not be able to advise you on how to get it published. Buy a copy of Writer’s Market at any bookstore; that will tell you how.
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Those who wish to make offers for rights of a literary nature should contact Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit, 285 Madison Avenue, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10017. (Note: This is not an invitation for you to send her your manuscript or to solicit her to be your agent.)
If you want to know if I will be signing books in your city, please visit my website, www.stuartwoods.com, where the tour schedule will be published a month or so in advance. If you wish me to do a book signing in your locality, ask your favorite bookseller to contact his Penguin representative or the Penguin publicity department with the request.
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A list of my published works appears in the front of this book and on my website. All the novels are still in print in paperback and can be found at or ordered from any bookstore. If you wish to obtain hardcover copies of earlier novels or of the two nonfiction books, a good used-book store or one of the online bookstores can help you find them. Otherwise, you will have to go to a great many garage sales.
Keep reading for an excerpt from the next Teddy Fay novel featuring Stone Barrington, Jackpot.
1
Teddy Fay just wanted to sleep. He’d never had trouble sleeping, even in war zones and on the trail of high-profile targets. But a series of Hollywood scouting meetings across three continents in seven days in his identity as movie producer Billy Barnett had done him in.
He was in the first-class lounge at the Hong Kong airport waiting for the final leg of his flight back to Los Angeles, when he felt someone approaching. He ignored his instincts and closed his eyes tighter. When the sensation of being watched wouldn’t go away, he opened his eyes just in time to see a face leaning in toward him.
In one motion, Teddy rolled off the leather couch he’d been curled up on and shot his right elbow out toward the face in front of him. When he hit the ground, he was fully awake and expected that to be the end of it. But the person was still there. It was an Asian woman with hard, beautiful features and a lithe frame. She took a step toward him and stretched out her hand. He swatted at her hand as he stood up, but instead of pulling away, she engaged with his hand and tugged his arm.
As Teddy fell toward the woman, he spun around so his back was facing her and dropped into a less than graceful version of the splits. He snapped his right leg back at the woman and swept her legs out from underneath her. Again, he expected that to be the end of it. If this woman was a thief looking for a quick score from a sleeping tourist, Teddy had made it very clear he was not an easy target. Since it was the middle of the night, there were only a few other people around, and all were absorbed in their own business. Maybe she would go away and pick a new victim.
Or maybe she wasn’t trying to rob him. Maybe she was trying to kill him.
As far as Teddy knew, the short list of people looking to kill Billy Barnett had been taken care of back in Los Angeles. Was she there for Teddy? The list of people wanting to kill Teddy was more robust, but he wasn’t traveling under that name and he’d taken great care to keep Teddy in the shadows as much as possible.
He never carried a gun when he was traveling on Centurion Studios business, and that had rarely been a problem. Now he was looking around the minimal furnishings of the lounge area to see if there was anything he could use as a weapon, but his thought process kept being interrupted by the woman repeatedly coming at him.
Teddy rolled around the floor away from her approaches, quickly processing his surroundings. Before he’d settled on a course of action, he saw security approaching and, for once, he was happy to see armed guards in uniform. He stopped rolling and lay flat on his back, waiting for the guards to take the woman away. But they came for him, too. He saw the Tasers just before he felt them, and then he was finally asleep.