"If Yannis has been threatened, I'm sure the police will do whatever it takes to protect him. Where is he now?"

"Hiding."

"So he's safe for now?"

"They'll find him and kill him and I'll have no one."

"Who's they, Alcina?"

"Iraqis."

"Was it Iraqis who tore up the place?"

The woman expelled a soul-searing shriek that set Dinah's teeth on edge. At a loss for comforting words, she patted Alcina's shoulder. "There, there." But Alcina only wailed louder and she gave up the effort. In the face of such an outpouring of grief, Mother Mary would have there-thered in vain. "Would you recognize the vandals if you saw them again?"

"Iraqis."

Dinah didn't doubt that Fathi might have had friends or countrymen out for Yannis' blood. But this was Zenia Stephanadis' house and any Iraqi refugee who busted up the property of a prominent Greek citizen would know that he faced certain deportation or prison. If on the other hand, the culprits were locals who resented the fact that Zenia had rented the place to a policeman...

"Did you actually see the vandals, Alcina?"

"Didn't have to. I know."

Dinah wasn't so sure. "Okay, Alcina. Try to calm yourself. I'll go and relay your concerns to Thor."

She marched back down the hall with a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. What sort of scary predicament had they blundered into? The sound of the water drubbing against the door had ceased and she smacked it open with force, causing it to swing back on its hinges.

Thor was coiling the hose. He said, "I don't think Zenia is going to return my deposit."

"Probably not."

"I phoned her and told her what happened. She'll stop by tomorrow to see for herself. The police will come by and confer with us in the morning."

"I'd like to confer with you tonight. I think we should move to a different island."

"You may be right." He hung the hose on a peg on the side of the house. "Let's go upstairs. I don't want to be overheard."

She led the way upstairs. Something in his body language intensified the queasy feeling .

Inside their bedroom, he closed the window and clicked on the radio. An explosion of static assaulted their ears before he located a station playing a bouncy folk tune. He turned the volume up, sat Dinah down on the side of the bed, and stood in front of her, his hands jammed in his pockets. "I quit my job in Norway at the beginning of this year. I'm not a Norwegian policeman."

"You're not on sabbatical?"

"No."

"Are you trying to get hired as a policeman here?"

"I'm already a policeman here. I'm working undercover for N.C.I.S."

"You're working on a TV show?"

"Not that N.C.I.S."

"How many are there? The only one I've ever heard of is a serial whodunit about the American Naval Criminal Investigative Service and a hotshot marine named Leroy Jethro Gibbs who discovers dead bodies like clockwork."

"Don't be flippant."

"Me flippant? Either the sun has addled you or you're mocking me."

"I'm not mocking you. I work for Norway's National Criminal Investigation Service and I'm violating any number of rules by telling you. But things have taken an unexpected turn and you deserve to know the score."

"Norway has an N.C.I.S.?"

"Yes. It liaises with Interpol and national police organizations. I'm here to investigate a ring of illegal arms traffickers. Samos is the entry point for migrants from all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East and it's the nexus of a number of smuggling routes for moving people and weapons north into Europe. As it happens, arms dealing is a local tradition in Kanaris dating back to the end of the Second World War."

"This little place?"

"Yes, this little place. Today Greece is awash in weapons, mostly cheap, Turkish-made guns smuggled across the Aegean from Turkey by Iraqis and sold on the black market. German arms manufacturers have also been flooding the Greek military with weapons, raking in big profits while running up Greek debt. But between '67 and '74, it was the United States that lavished weapons on the military junta."

"That was forty years ago."

"Recently, caches of forty-year-old, mint-new American rifles, handguns, and grenades have been turning up in conflict zones from Sudan to Mexico. Three months ago, N.C.I.S. detained two operatives of the Albanian mafia in Oslo. They were carrying a duffel bag full of M1911 automatic pistols like those the U.S. used in Vietnam. One of the Albanians claimed that contraband American weapons were being sold and distributed out of Kanaris by Iraqis."

So many countries. She felt as if she'd been fire-hosed with information, a crash course in the geopolitics of warfare. She couldn't digest it. "It's insane. A tiny Greek village becomes a hotbed of arms smuggling and peace-loving Norway enters the world of international espionage."

"From '95 to 2005, Norway had an elite intelligence gathering unit, E-Fourteen, that carried out covert missions abroad in Afghanistan and the Balkans. The unit was suspended and these last few years we've been living under the illusion that we are safe and secure, too far north and too non-controversial for the bad guys to take notice. But we have critical infrastructure and assets to protect and the government has opted to revive E-Fourteen to monitor new threats."

"Why in the world did this elite unit pick you for a covert operation, in Greece of all places?" She didn't mean to dis him, but he was a long way from Longyearbyen, Norway. "I mean, why send a policeman from a small town in the Arctic. You have no experience as a spy."

"As a matter of fact, most Norwegian intelligence stations are located north of the Arctic Circle." A spark of anger flashed in his eyes. "I don't know, Dinah. N.C.I.S. keeps U.S. intelligence in the loop. Maybe one of your American senators that I offended last year recommended me, hoping I'd die in the line of duty."

Her jaw dropped. He could fight dirty when he chose to. She said, "Bad joke. Knock wood and cross your fingers." She went to the window and stood with her back to him until she was sure her voice was under control. "Was Fathi one of the smugglers?"

He answered in a neutral tone. "I think so, but he would have been a small cog in the operation. There are hundreds of illegal arms sellers across Europe. E-Fourteen doesn't have the manpower or the resources to go after them all. It's the buyers we're interested in, the terrorists. If I can identify the sellers, it may be feasible to trace the weapons to the buyers. I'm not here to shut down the operation, but what I learn may provide clues to how it can be infiltrated in the future."

"How would somebody like Fathi be able to take guns across borders?"

"Just by getting into Greece, he could cross freely into other E.U. countries without showing travel documents. To get into a non-E.U. country like Norway, he needed an identity card and he had one. A German card with his name and photo. It would have gotten him through in the event he was stopped or questioned in any Schengen E.U. country."

She turned back from the window. "Who's running the operation on Samos? Germans? Greeks? Iraqis? Alcina is terrified that Iraqis will kill Yannis. Is he part of the operation? Is that what he and Fathi were arguing about?"

"I don't think Yannis is mixed up in the smuggling, but I'd be willing to bet he knows something about the history of those American guns and how they came to be cached here in Kanaris. Most of the people in the village are old-time communists. They know how to keep their secrets."

"So do you." She couldn't absorb forty years of intrigue. It was all she could do to absorb the fact that Thor had invited her to Samos under false pretenses. "What was I supposed to be, Thor? Window dressing? A stage prop to make you appear more like a tourist?"

"No, of course not. Bringing you here was an added benefit."

"And all that rigmarole about the trouble you took searching out a place that I'd enjoy, sunshine and ancient ruins, and sharing a holiday in the sun with me, that was just a line?"

"It wasn't a line, Dinah. I thought you would love this place. Plans can have more than one purpose."

"Like a Swiss Army knife. Each item has a use."

He reached out and stroked her cheek. "We were going to be so close, me here on Samos, you just across the strait in Turkey. I thought we could have this time together to find out if..." Wherever he was going with that line, he stopped short and dropped his hand. "I thought I could keep my job separate. If I'd thought that what I was doing would put you in jeopardy, I wouldn't have asked you to come. I thought Fathi's murder was the result of infighting among the smugglers and my mission on Samos was still a secret. I can't be sure what this vandalism business means, but I think I've been betrayed."

"I know that I have. You lied to me from the start."

"Don't be self-righteous, Dinah. You've been known to tell a lie when it suits you."

"Not one that makes a monkey out of someone I care about." She grabbed a pillow off the bed and threw it at him. "Find yourself another bed. Tomorrow morning I'm out of here."

He took the pillow and started to leave. At the door, he turned. "You're right to go. I want you safe and out of harm's way. But we're good together, Dinah. Don't throw our chance away without giving it deeper thought."

When the door closed behind him, she shut off the music and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, already wishing he'd tossed that pillow aside and kissed her. She went back to the window and misted up. You should have known that he was on the job, that his obsession with Marilita wasn't idle curiosity and that song and dance about visiting with the local constabulary wasn't because he wanted tips on how to manage a passel of rowdy tourists. You should have known this romantic fantasy on Samos was too good to be true and you may as well quit crying and get over it.

Think about something else-the sack of Troy, the fall of Thebes, that chrome-white moon bellied out like Artemis' boyfriend-killing bow. What had Marilita thought about when she looked up at the moon from this same window? Love? Betrayal? Murder? The overthrow of the Greek state? Thor must have cause to believe that her crime related in some way to the theft of those American weapons. It would be rich if it turned out that a Hollywood actress had outsmarted the junta, stolen a consignment of American weapons, and passed them out to the communists of Kanaris.

Day 3.

Chapter Eleven.

"Son-of-a-bitch!" Dinah knelt down and looked at the Picanto's tires, all four slashed to ribbons and flat. "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!"

"The vandals again," said K.D.

Dinah walked through the parking lot, checking out the other cars. Hers was the only one to have received the special treatment. Thor's car was gone. He must have left before dawn and there was nobody else around to help. The nearest gas station was miles away and, even if the rental company sent a tow truck and a new set of tires right away, the last flight to Athens would have departed by the time she got the bill paid and the paperwork settled.

K.D. arched her back across the hood, covered her eyes with one hand, and struck a languishing pose. "Looks like we're going to miss the seven o'clock flight."

Dinah gave her the gimlet eye. The vandals weren't the only suspects. She had rousted K.D. out of bed at five to allow plenty of time to get to the airport for the seven o'clock flight to Athens. K.D. had been surprisingly speedy and compliant. Too compliant? To be fair, it would have taken more muscle than K.D. had to shred those tires.

Well, as K.D.'s daddy used to say in his phony redneck vernacular, crying don't feed the bulldog. It sure wouldn't fix four flat tires. Dinah looked at her watch and rearranged her timetable. The police hadn't showed up yet to investigate last night's vandalism and she didn't relish the idea of sitting on the curb all morning waiting for them. There was no guarantee they would come at all or, if they did, that they would waste time on her problem. She had no choice but to call the rental agency and it would probably be hours before they could muster up a tow truck.

K.D. sauntered around the parking lot. "You could call the Greek Triple A."

"I doubt that there is one on Samos."

"Then we should go back to the house. At least it'll be cool there. We can eat some yogurt and you can think about what we want to do next."

Dinah didn't like the togetherness implicit in that remark. "K.D., you do understand this is only a temporary delay, don't you? You're going home to Atlanta and I'm going to Istanbul as soon as I can get us to the airport."

"I'm resigned to my fate."

"Uh-huh." Dinah caught the handle of her roller bag and started trudging up the road. It seemed that Fate was forever ambushing her. The early Greeks believed that everything that happened was predetermined by a trinity of goddesses known collectively as the Moirai and, whatever they threw at you, it was futile to resist. Clotho spun the thread of life, giving life to both mortals and gods. Lachesis measured the thread from Clotho's spindle, allotting each life a finite length. And Atropos got to decide the manner of death and snip the thread with her ruthless shears. Dinah was thankful her thread was still spooling, but the slashed tires pissed her off profoundly.

She didn't know where Thor had gone or for how long and she did not want to be lolling on the veranda when he returned. Don't throw our chance away. That was why she had come to Samos in the first place. He was the one who had blown their chance, or at least relocated it to some other island at some unspecified future time. But it was her own fault if she felt hurt. She flattered herself that she was a cynic, but she was the worst kind of sap-a sap who was constantly surprised that people lied to each other. People lied all the time for a gazillion reasons they justified to themselves. If she wasn't a full-fledged cynic yet, there seemed to be a worldwide conspiracy to turn her into one. If Thor thought she was too "tough-minded" and cynical to get worked up over his little deception, she was a victim of her own smarty-pants rhetoric.

"You can be mean to me if you want to," said K.D., "but I think you're being immature about Thor."

Dinah sighed. K.D. couldn't have heard their argument above the noise of the radio, but maybe she sneaked downstairs in the night and saw Thor bunked on the sofa. She said, "When I need your input, I'll ask."

"Whatever you're mad at him for, you should lighten up and cut the guy some slack. He's obviously Level Ten about you and a woman in her mid-thirties doesn't have much time left for a truly great love. Thor could be your last chance. You know what Lucien said to my mother? He said, my sister is the architect of all her disappointments."

Dinah whipped around with a strong message for her brother on her lips, but was distracted by the appearance of a young man on a Vespa motoring into the parking lot. He dismounted and took off his helmet. He smiled up at her and she had a brainstorm. Mentor. He had said that if she needed help while she was on the island, she should ask for him and that everybody knew him. It was worth a try. He might know a tow truck driver or a tire salesman who could do the job fast.

"Parakalo," she called out to the young man, going deep into her Greek vocabulary. It meant something like "hello" or "please" or "I'm here and I have a question." It was a pointless word because her question was, "Do you speak English?"

"Ne, malista." He dipped his head to the side.

She'd learned that ne meant yes, in spite of the fact that it sounded like no. An up-and-down nod and a word that sounded like "okay" meant no. She rolled her bag back down the hill and asked, "Do you know a man named Mentor?"

"He lives down there." He pointed along a grooved concrete path leading down the mountain from the parking lot. "The fourth house."

"Thank you. Efkharisto." She stowed her suitcase in the trunk of the Picanto. "Leave your bag here, K.D. Turn on your phone and go up to the house and wait for me. I'll call you if and when I get some new tires."

Dinah left K.D. chatting with the young man in the parking lot and hied off in search of Mentor. Tires weren't the only things rolling through her mind. She was thinking that thirty-three was hardly the mid-thirties. She was thinking that if Thor was Level Ten about her, he had a funny way of showing it. He should have trusted her enough to tell her the truth up front. Even so, she should have been less accusatory and more understanding of his dilemma. How mature did a person had to be to navigate the rip currents of a romantic relationship?

The concrete turned to dirt and the path steepened. The footing became increasingly treacherous and she couldn't take her eyes off the ground for fear of falling. She had to stop at every switchback to look for the house. Her knees began to feel the strain. Dear God, her joints were creaking. She could hear...no. Somebody was tuning a violin.

After a few sporadic twangs, the violin erupted in a wild gypsy melody. The beauty and the virtuosity were so improbable that she forgot her anger. She followed the music around two more switchbacks. As the fourth red-tiled roof came into view, she saw Mentor seated under a plane tree with the instrument tucked under his chin. He was wielding the bow like a man possessed. She approached almost on tiptoe, not wanting him to stop. When he did, a large black cat vaulted into his lap.

"Yia'sou, Mentor. You play beautifully."

"Yia'sou, Dinah Pelerin. That piece is from Russia. It is called 'Black Eyes.' But if you come to the taverna after ten tonight, I will play Greek music. My daughter will dance and her husband will play the goatskin."

"A drum?"

"Nothing so ordinary. The goatskin is a kind of Greek bagpipe. You must hear it."

"That would be fun, but I'm afraid I can't be there."

"Then you must sit down with me and taste my Samos nectar. It is made from our famous Muscat grapes, acclaimed by Charlemagne and celebrated in a poem by Lord Byron." He set down his violin, petted the cat, and reached for a wine bottle on the table beside him. "After we taste, I will give you a private concert. Perhaps you will dance."

She laughed. "I'd love to hear you play more, but the house was vandalized last night and I discovered this morning that someone had slashed my tires. I thought you might know someone who could help me."

"But that is barbaric." He threw up his hands. "First murder and now this. We are under siege. It must have been one of the refugees from the camp in Samos Town. What does your policeman friend think?"

Mentor, too? She said, "I haven't spoken with Thor about the situation yet. Things are in turmoil and I need to get my car fixed as soon as possible. Do you know anyone with a truck who could deliver a new set of tires this morning and mount them for me?"

"I know a man in Karlovassi. But it is too early yet. Taste my wine and after an hour, I will call him. Sit."