"Yes, Pappa, I'm so sorry. I hope I didn't ruin your party."

Casey added a tremor to her voice and conjured up a few crocodile tears to go along with her act as the terrified female.

"Ms. Meridio, I'm so sorry. I should never have allowed you to go off to the powder room alone," Tessa apologized for Meridio's benefit, also explaining to Casey where her father thought she was.

"Thank you for coming to my rescue. He was following me *around, and I thought if I slipped into your office," Casey looked at her father, "that he would leave me alone. I didn't realize he'd try to force himself on me." Casey was playing the helpless woman to the hilt.

"Forgive me, Mahtia Mou, " Meridio apologized. "I should never have asked you to come to the party this evening. There are some men who just don't know how to behave in front of ladies.

Are you feeling all right now?"

"As a matter of fact, I'm feeling a little shaky after all that,"

Casey lied. "Would it ruin your evening too much, Pappa, if I just called it a night and went to bed?"

Tessa was biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud. Had the situation not been so deadly serious, it would have been comical.

"Of course not . Tessa will go with you. Tessa, I want to see you by Ca.s.sandra's side every minute of the day and night for the rest of the weekend. I do not want a repeat of what happened tonight."

"You can count on me, Mr. Meridio. I won't let her out of my sight."

This time, it was Casey's turn to bite her lip and fight off the smile that threatened.

"You are truly gifted," Tessa exclaimed once they were inside the guesthouse.

"I got them, Niko." Casey looked up at Tessa.

"Are you kidding me? From the desk?"

"From a hollowed-out book," Casey said smugly.

"Oh, quit fooling...really?" Tessa was stunned. She slipped her arms around Casey. "I swear, I will never make fun of your American television shows again."

Casey kissed Tessa and broke away, lifting up her dress slightly to retrieve the invoice slips. Tessa scanned them quickly.

"This one." Tessa held up one of the slips. "He's the bald guy you met tonight."

"I thought that was his name."

"Okay, first things first. Get on your computer and e-mail 0.

*Jack. Tell him what we've got and ask him how long we stick around now."

Tessa turned and walked into the kitchen. She pulled out a plastic baggy and placed the slips inside. After scanning the room for a moment, she opened a flour canister and tucked the package inside, burying the plastic bag in flour.

Casey typed the message to Jack, but she suddenly became uncharacteristically quiet. It all happened so fast and now their question was how long do we stick around? It became a rather anticlimactic moment for Casey, realizing that now her life as Ca.s.sandra Meridio, at least the life she enjoyed in Greece, was over. The burden that Casey didn't want to look at yet still weighed heavily on her. If this is it, when will Tessa do it? Should she ask or just hope that Tessa grew to see past her vow?

As the two women lay in bed together, waiting for sleep to claim them, each became surrounded in the same thought, only looking at it from a different perspective.

When will she do it?

Will I still do it?

It was after four a.m., but that didn't seem to matter to Jack.

He remembered those missions in the jungles of Guatemala where he'd stayed awake for a week, barely sleeping ten minutes a day. He was dozing off when he got the call that Casey e-mailed.

Casey said they found the proof, handwritten invoices, which implicated the Turks, who happened to be spending the weekend at the Meridio estate. The center was thrown into high gear with the news.

"Oh, she's good," Jack muttered to himself. They couldn't have possibly timed it any better. Now they could grab the Turks in this country and tell the consulate in Turkey to go to h.e.l.l.

"We got a little bit of a problem here, boss."

Jack turned to the computer whiz kid the Bureau sent him.

The kid was an agent, but how he got through the academy was a mystery. He had computer nerd written all over him. What p.i.s.sed Jack off the most was the kid continued to call him boss after he told him he would break his kneecaps if he did it again.

*"What the h.e.l.l do you mean, a problem?" Jack asked.

"Well, the cameras we nixed at the Greek's place...they're in the know again," the whiz kid said.

"What the h.e.l.l is he saying, in English?" Armstrong asked the woman next to him. She was Korean, but at least he could understand her.

"The cameras in the Meridio estate. Tessa said no one ever looked at the cameras or the tapes, they were only running in case of a break-in, then they'd run it back. So we disabled them. We had one of our guys go in for a phone repair and slip a magnet inside the taping mechanism of all the cameras."

"I know all this...get to the we're in trouble part." Jack growled impatiently.

"Somebody must have cleaned them out, the magnets I mean.

See, we set up a little satellite so we can see what they see. They didn't catch that when they did their housecleaning."

The woman opened a laptop computer and with a few keystrokes, scrolled through all the camera views on the Meridio estate. All were in fine working condition. The computer tech blushed when they landed on the camera view from Tessa's bedroom in the guesthouse. Tessa lay sleeping with Casey wrapped protectively in her embrace. The tech quickly scrolled past them.

"So how did you find out at four in the morning that the cameras were working again?" Jack said, tired of waiting for the punch line to this scenario.

"That's the we're in trouble part," the woman said. "We get an indicator when someone is using the system. Someone is viewing the cameras and replaying some recorded tapes."

"What?" Armstrong shouted. "When?"

"Right now." The tech indicated the flashing red light at the top of the screen.

"Where...which cameras?"

"Um...Meridio's office...the daughter's bedroom, and uh..."

She pressed a few keys on the keyboard. "The guesthouse."

"Jesus Christ! Out, we need to get them out of there now!"

Armstrong practically screamed at a half-dozen agents milling around the room.

*Instantly, the room became a flurry of activity.

"The phone, get me the number to Tessa's phone," Jack shouted, frantically flipping through numbers in the computer index.

"Cell phone and house phone are unsecured, boss," the annoying computer nerd said calmly.

"You stupid f.u.c.k," Armstrong shouted. "It doesn't matter now...they've already been made!"

"It's ringing on three," another agent shouted over the din.

Armstrong grabbed the receiver and punched line three.

"Yeah?" Tessa's sleepy voice growled on the third ring.

"Tessa, it's Jack. Get outta there, get out now...you're made."

Chapter 20.

Andreas Meridio was dead tired. He'd stopped drinking about two hours before, but his guests wanted to stay and party all night, it seemed. He was under obligation to be a good host, and that's what he did. He stayed until the last one retired. He only had another hour or two until the sun came up, and he desperately needed to take advantage of the last couple of hours of night that were left. Meridio's breath caught as he walked in and saw the flashing red light on the console of cameras in the outer suite of his rooms.

This was the first time that happened. It was a small security measure and known only to him. He sat and brought the screen in his office to life. He had the alarm system installed when he first thought of the idea. He kept his private invoices in the book and had some computer company come in and hook up the book to a sensor alarm. Funny thing was that while they were there, they found that none of the cameras was capturing to tape. The two men who found the problem showed him a bunch of tiny magnets, explaining that it was probably done on purpose. Meridio didn't fret too much over it; he was constantly having the place swept for new bugs and cameras. Interpol was nothing if not persistent, but Meridio smiled as he rewound the tape from his office to the time the alarm went off. It would take a lot more than what they had to cause him to worry. Once he hit the play b.u.t.ton and watched the scene unfold, his smile quickly faded.

*Of course, seeing Casey caught on tape was about as stunning as it got. At least that's what he kept saying to himself. He punched in a series of b.u.t.tons on the console, trying to bring up all the times Casey had been in the house. What he saw on more than one tape shocked him into speechlessness. He knew in his heart that Casey wouldn't do this of her own free will. There must have been someone else behind Ca.s.sandra's actions. He reversed the tapes farther, attempting to capture Casey in a room at the same time with the person he immediately suspected. What he saw happen between his Kare and his daughter told him all he needed to know.

"That f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!" he hissed venomously.

"Alex," Meridio said into the phone's receiver once he calmed himself enough to speak. "Get Stefano and come up to my room.

We have a traitor in our midst. Stop by Peter's room and bring him, too," he added as an afterthought. In case Tessa wanted to put up a fight, he would add a little muscle to stop her.

His thoughts went back to Casey, and he cursed himself for putting the innocent girl in the path of Tessa Nikolaidis. He was certain that Casey had no idea what she had gotten herself into. He also suspected that Casey had been seduced by Tessa's beauty and charm as so many other women on Mkonos had been. Meridio wondered why Casey never suspected that Tessa was just using her as a piece in her game of revenge.

"Casey!" Tessa whispered sharply. "Wake up...right now."

Tessa was already out of bed and throwing clothes on. She grabbed her gun and shoved her keys into her pocket. Casey was scared awake by the tenor of her voice. Casey grabbed for a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, lacing her shoes before even asking for an explanation.

"What is it?"

"We've been made, that was Jack on the phone. He told us to get out of here fast."

Casey knew in an instant that the situation had deteriorated as they slept. Somehow, the missing invoices had been discovered and they were in serious and immediate trouble. That would be *the only reason for Jack to call in the wee hours to tell them to get out.

"Don't turn on the light," Tessa whispered as she went out to the living room. Looking toward the main house through a carefully parted curtain, she saw Stefano and Alex walking this way. Peter Tsigaris, the large bodyguard, walked slightly behind them. They still had some distance to cover and the small grove of olive trees surrounding the guesthouse would hide what she planned next.

She silently moved back into the bedroom and grasped Casey's hand, pulling her into the darkened kitchen. Tessa retrieved the invoice slips from the flour canister and shoved them deep into Casey's pocket.

"Do you know how to get around the olive grove and over the break wall?" Tessa asked.

"I'm not leaving you, Niko," Casey said adamantly.

"Casey...sweetheart," Tessa whispered, holding the woman's face in her hands. "Remember when I told you that I can take care of myself, but only if I'm not worrying about you? I told you that I would need you to do everything I said exactly when I said it...

remember?"

Casey's eyes filled with tears and she nodded. "I know how to get over the break wall," she said in defeat.

"Do you think you can climb up to your bedroom terrace from there?"

Casey nodded again.

"Okay, make sure you don't enter the house through any of the main doors. Grab a jacket of some kind, your gun, and your pa.s.sport. I need to ask you to get Olympia out of there." Tessa opened another canister on the kitchen counter and pulled out a large roll of bank notes. She pulled the keys to her car from her pocket, picked up her cell phone, and thrust them all into Casey's hands.

"My car isn't in the garage. It's parked down on the hill by the pond. Just don't turn on the lights until you get on the road into Mkonos Town . Take the road up to Ano Mera...you remember how to get to my house up there?" Tessa asked, reminding Casey *of the night that became a turning point for the two women.

"I think I remember."

"If you have Olympia with you, she'll know the way. No one knows I still own that property. It's the home we lived in when my father was alive. Use the cell phone and punch in star-seven- seven, that's Jack's secure line. Tell him where you are and I'll meet you there as soon as I can."

Tessa opened the door slowly and Casey threw her arms around Tessa's neck. Tessa held Casey, then pulling away slightly, she kissed her pa.s.sionately.

"I love you, Niko," Casey whispered.

"Right back at ya, baby," Tessa said. Jesus, I'm as close to the end of my rope as I can get and still I can't tell you, Casey.

"I'll see you later," Tessa added softly, touching her fingertips to Casey's cheek and stepping outside.

Tessa motioned for Casey to stay put until she saw that the men had not yet arrived at the guesthouse. Waving her hand, she kissed Casey quickly and pushed her in the direction of the break wall. Tessa couldn't keep from smiling as she watched Casey disappear into the darkness . Just like when we were kids, little one...you always were small and fast.

Tessa moved silently around the right side of the house and watched as Peter tried to peer in through the front window. She couldn't catch sight of the other two men.

"Is this a social call?" Tessa drawled.

The bodyguard spun around and smiled stonily at Tessa.

He smiled because she was unarmed and hand to hand was his specialty.

"Meridio said he wanted you and his girl brought to the house.

Looks like your days of being top gun here are over . Of course, he didn't say what kind of shape you had to be in." Peter cracked his knuckles and moved toward the woman.