Zealot

  The lobby was empty, the last of the patrons gone for the day. As MacLeod hurried through it and into the glassed-in cloister walk through the sculpture garden that connected Constantine’s exhibit to the rest of the museum, he noted that it seemed the employees had gone home for the day as well. He was midway down the walk when he heard an explosion. Simultaneously he could feel a vibration in his soul—there was a Quickening.

  MacLeod broke into a full run just as another explosion rocked the cloister. The fire alarm began to sound its urgent wail. He slammed through the massive wood doors leading to the marble gallery, not waiting for them to swing open at their own automated pace. “Marcus!” he screamed out over the alarms and the lightning and the water cascading from the ceiling.

  He found the giant rend in the temporary wall of the entranceway near the Arch of Titus. Drawing his katana, feeling the weight of it in his hand, he pushed through the hole into another corridor. He ran in the direction where he could sense an Immortal. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the Quickening ended and all that remained were the sound of the alarms and the sprays of water dousing the fires.

  “Marcus!” he called out again, but the sensation grew farther and farther away, until it was gone entirely. MacLeod’s heart went black. Had Constantine been the victor, he wouldn’t have run from his own museum.

  Dear God. Marcus. MacLeod stood in the doorway of the Temple room for a long minute, unable to will himself to enter, but unwilling to abandon his friend, even to go after his killer. And MacLeod had no doubt about the killer’s identity.

  He finally moved into the room, close to the body sprawled across the fragments of the broken Temple. In the back of his mind, he could hear Constantine’s voice. “And never, ever get involved in the politics of Palestine. It will only bring you grief.”

  “You were more right than you’ll ever know, Marcus,” he said, his voice husky with sorrow. He reached out and touched his friend’s body, trying to convince himself that it was real, that this awful thing had happened to a man who meant no harm to anyone. He saw the boot knife embedded in Constantine’s chest and pulled it out angrily.

  Then, in the debris near the body, he spotted the gray figurine Constantine had identified as his own. He was right, it wasn’t a very good likeness. With a fierce shake of his head to fend off any tears, MacLeod thrust the figurine and the knife into the pockets of his overcoat and stormed from the room.

  There was no trace of Avram in or around the museum. MacLeod knew there wouldn’t be, but he had to look anyway. He had to keep moving, had to keep busy, or the full impact of Constantine’s loss would cripple him.

  The Hôtel Renaissance was next, the safe haven of the Israeli delegation. An enormous crowd of reporters was gathered in front of the stately building, barely held in check by a ring of security operatives. Their weapons weren’t drawn, but the men in the suits made it obvious they meant business.

  MacLeod double-parked the Citroën against a news van and forced his way through the mob, not caring who or how many he jostled and elbowed on his way to the front. Avram wasn’t among the security team. No surprise.

  A dark man on an angry mission, he pushed past a security guard and made it as far as the first step before being stopped by two more guards, their weapons drawn.

  “Avram Mordecai,” MacLeod growled at them.

  “Who?” The security man was purposely blank.

  “Avram Mordecai,” he repeated, enunciating each syllable carefully. “He’s one of your security guys. I want to see him,” he said in that tone that clearly meant that “no” would be the wrong answer, “now.“

  Never heard of him.” The Israeli was unintimidated. “Now get lost before we take you out of here in a bag.” MacLeod opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it when he realized the eyes of the entire security team as well as the international press were upon him.

  MacLeod backed off, started back to his car. He’d find some other way in. Avram wouldn’t elude him for long. The crowd parted for him to pass through. He had nearly cleared the mob when a French photographer recognized him. “He was with the Palestinians this morning!”

  MacLeod took off at a nun. He dodged around two journalists trying to block him and slipped the grasp of a television soundman in the back of the crowd. In the clear, he raced for the Citroën and jumped in before the reporters dogging his heels caught up with him. He barely pulled away before the pack of newshounds smelling “lead story” could surround his car.

  MacLeod returned to the barge feeling tired and defeated as the sun was setting over the Seine. In the three hours since he’d discovered what Avram had done to Constantine, he felt like he’d accomplished nothing. As he got out of his car at the Quai de la Tournelle, how he wished for Maral’s healing hands to soothe away his pain. He could almost feel her soft touch on the back of his neck, but then the feeling was blasted away by his sudden awareness of another Immortal.

  Pulling his katana, he looked warily around, his eyes taking in the embankment, the road, the barge. There, cross-legged at the bow, a figure silhouetted in the sunset sat motionless, staring out at the water. MacLeod, striding rapidly toward the barge, mentally readied himself for combat and issued his challenge.

  “Avram!”

  The figure turned to him. “Afraid not,” Methos said, uncoiling his body and standing.

  MacLeod sheathed his sword again and started grimly up the gangplank. “Constantine’s dead,” he said, and there was a mixture of sadness and anger in his voice.

  “I know, Amy, his assistant curator, phoned me. She was his Watcher.” Methos looked thoughtful for a moment. “You wouldn’t happen to play poker, would you?”

  “Methos …” MacLeod growled, not in the mood. He started belowdecks.

  “It was just a thought.” Methos followed him into the barge. “How is Dr. Amina?” Helping himself to an apple from a bowl of fruit on the coffee table, he plopped himself down recumbent on the sofa, his head propped up on one arm.

  MacLeod removed his black overcoat and tossed it on the back of the sofa near him. “Better than Avram would like, I’m sure. She’s got a nasty concussion. They were running a CAT scan and some other tests when I left the hospital, to see if there’s any permanent damage. Either way, she’ll be in for observation for at least a few more days.” He opened the fridge, took out a bottle of mineral water for himself. On second thought, he reached in and grabbed another bottle. “There’s some short-term memory loss. She can’t remember what happened,” he said, lobbing the second bottle at Methos, who, surprised, dropped the apple to catch it.

  “That’s probably a blessing.” Methos twisted off the cap, but didn’t drink. “So what are you going to do?”

  MacLeod rooted around some more in the fridge. Nothing looked appealing. He knew he wasn’t really hungry, just empty. “What do you mean, what am I going to do? I’m going to find him, that’s what I’m going to do.” He closed the fridge door with finality.

  “And then?” Methos raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “And then …” MacLeod felt himself start to flounder, “and then … I don’t know what then.” Restless, he wandered over to the cold fireplace and began raking out the dead ash.

  “It never gets any easier, does it?” Methos took a long, contemplative drink from the bottle as he watched MacLeod work. “Okay, let’s say he wasn’t your friend. Let’s say you’d never met him, and then he comes along and kills Marcus Constantine. What would you do?”

  MacLeod reached into a bin by the fireplace for fresh wood, glad to have a simple, mindless task like starting the fire to keep him occupied. “What, you’re my ethics professor now?” He pointed sternly with a piece of kindling. “You are the last person in the world to lecture me about ethics.”

  “Humor me. What do you do?”

  “I’d go after him.” MacLeod’s face was dark as he shoved the wood into the fireplace. “I’d make him pay with his own head.”

  M
ethos was intrigued. “Really? Would you? Revenge, just for playing the Game?”

  MacLeod stopped his work and turned on Methos. “Avram doesn’t play the Game,” he growled. “This was personal. ”

  Methos kept his tone light. “Ah, ah, but we’re not talking about Avram, remember. One Immortal takes another Immortal’s head. That’s the Game. Reasons don’t matter. Motives don’t matter. ‘There Can Be Only One’—and it’s not going to be Marcus Constantine.”

  The words ripped into MacLeod’s already painful wound. “You’re one heartless bastard, Methos.”

  “Just realistic. So, do you go after his killer?” he pressed. “Maybe.“Fair enough. Now, say you have a friend, a mortal like that chef friend of yours, Maurice.” As Methos spoke, MacLeod returned to his fire, carefully arranging the kindling, setting it alight. “One day, Maurice picks up a gun and aces six people who complained about his bouillabaisse, and only you know it was him. at do you do? Turn him in to face mortal justice, or go after him yourself?” Methos looked at his watch and began making tick-tock tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Your answer, Contestant Number One?”

  MacLeod laid down the bellows he’d been using to flame up the fire. “I can’t just turn Avram in to the police. Don’t you see, that’s just the kind of publicity he wants. My God, the Palestinians find out that the man who massacred dozens of their people works with the Israeli delegation … I don’t want to imagine the consequences.” MacLeod sat down heavily on the coffee table, the weight of the world pressing down on him.

  “Point to you,” Methos said. “Now, for the bonus round: Say you do track down and kill Avram Mordecai. Do you honestly believe it will make a bit of difference in the grand scheme of things? Please remember to phrase your answer in the form of a question.”

  MacLeod looked at him sourly. “Okay, how’s this: What the hell are you going on about?”

  Methos finally sat up, feet on the floor, down to business. “There are three kinds of peace in the world, MacLeod. There’s the peace achieved by one side defeating and dominating the other—what Marcus would have called the Pax Romana. There’s peace negotiated by two sides each seeing the error of its ways and truly dedicated to what’s best for both sides—call it the Platonic ideal of peace, if you will—and if you give me a week, I might be able to find an example where that’s actually worked. Then there’s the brokered peace like your friend is working on, each side forced to give up something they can’t live without. You can see how well that solved that little problem in Korea half a century back. Face it, that’s not peace, it’s just the absence of war.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t think these agreements are going to change anything.”

  “No piece of paper is going to change what’s in people’s hearts. Their fears, their prejudices, their thousands of years of history. So, yes, I do think a year, or a decade, or a century from now, we’ll all be back here again.”

  “But that doesn’t mean Avram doesn’t have to pay for murdering all those people.”

  “True, but I don’t want you to go out there thinking that whacking one overzealous Hebrew is miraculously going to solve the crisis in the Middle East.” Methos looked at the floor by his feet, bent low to look under the coffee table, then ran a quick hand under the sofa pillows. “Don’t suppose you saw where that apple went?”

  MacLeod tossed him another. “Whose side are you on, Methos?”

  “None but my own.” He bit lustily into the fruit and chewed with obvious relish before trying to finish his thought with his mouth full. “I find if you stay out of other people’s wars, you live longer.”

  Moving back to the fire, MacLeod put some more fuel on. The fire was already blazing, but he just couldn’t seem to shake the deep chill that had settled into his bones. He poked idly at the burning wood, accomplishing nothing. “I just …” he started, then tried again. “I really feel for him. All the horror he’s seen, the pain that he bears for his people.”

  “And the guilt,” Methos added, thoughtfully.

  “What do you mean, guilt?”

  “You’ve felt it, MacLeod. We all have to some extent. The guilt of living on while everyone around you dies.” Methos’s eyes grew dark and far away. “The guilt of knowing that some cruel and capricious fate has selected you to be the one to witness the suffering of everyone you’ve ever cared for, knowing that you’re powerless to stop it. Or to share it.” Methos spoke from deep within his own heart. “Or to forget it.”

  “To carry the memories of a hundred generations,” MacLeod said softly, “to protect their history and traditions. To ensure their survival. What an impossible burden.”

  “On the other hand”—the brief window into Methos’s soul closed abruptly and was quickly replaced by his usual smug facade—“he did just try to waste your girlfriend.”

  MacLeod sighed. “And he killed Marcus.”

  “You know,” Methos shrugged, “Marcus was a great believer in cosmic justice. What goes around, comes around. Somehow I think he always knew that when his card came up, it would be at the hands of someone he had wronged in the past. Maybe now, somehow, honor has been satisfied for him.”

  “But not for Assad,” MacLeod said. “Not for those men praying at that mosque. You were right—reasons and motives don’t matter. I understand why Avram feels he has to do what he’s doing. But he’s got to be stopped before he causes an-other war. Before more people die.“And?” Methos prompted.

  “And,” MacLeod was resigned, “I’m the only one who can stop him.” He grabbed his coat from the sofa and started for the barge door. “I have to find him.”

  Methos called out to him as he opened the door, “Where are you going?”

  “It’s a Friday night. Where would you go if you were a devout Jew who’d just killed his teacher?” As MacLeod left, Methos settled back on the sofa to finish his apple and enjoy the heat of MacLeod’s fire.

  The cantor had just intoned the final “Amen” when Avram knew with great certainty there was another Immortal in the synagogue. He stayed in his seat, head bowed beneath his prayer cap, his yarmulke, while the rest of the congregation filed out, trusting that MacLeod …for he knew it could be no other—would have sense enough to wait until they were alone to confront him.

  He hadn’t enjoyed killing Constantine. For all Avram’s complaints to the contrary, for all his bitterness, Marcus had been like another father to him during a very dark time in his life, a time in which his soul was so black he might have considered suicide had he thought it even possible for one as cursed as he. Marcus had shown him life. Marcus had made him see that his Immortality didn’t mean he was damned by God; instead, that he was being called by God for a different purpose. Even so, it was centuries before he truly realized what God wanted—a champion for his chosen people.

  And then Marcus betrayed him, plotted against him and, by so doing, betrayed the People of God. He had to be stopped. Avram had no choice.

  MacLeod was close by him now, he could tell, so he didn’t flinch when something metallic dropped onto the bench beside him. “I think this is yours,” MacLeod’s voice said, and Avram turned to see the bloody boot knife he’d used to silence Constantine. He looked up to see MacLeod glowering above him—dark eyes, dark coat, dark countenance.

  “Is this what you do on Friday nights, MacLeod? Cruise the synagogues? You need a life,” Avram sneered, standing.

  “Oneg Shabbat isn’t a terrorist organization; Oneg Shabbat is you,” MacLeod accused.

  Avram gave him a little smile, posturing before MacLeod’s anger. “I’ve always done some of my best work on the Muslim Sabbath. And you must admit, it was quite a surprise.”

  If they weren’t standing on Holy Ground, Avram knew he’d probably be dead now. But instead, MacLeod was forced to swallow his rage and fight only with words. “You take the work that your friends in the Ghetto gave their lives for and you pervert it into this … this abomination! The Lutëtia, Hebron, how many people h
ave you killed in their name?”

  Avram decided to change the subject. He pushed past MacLeod, out into the aisle, and started to walk toward the front of the synagogue. “Boring conversation. Let’s talk about Gamal Ali Mustapha, instead. Name ring any bells?” Noting MacLeod’s blank look, he continued. “It should. You’re screwing his wife.”

  “Maral’s husband is dead.”

  Avram nodded. “Sad, but true. At the time of his death, he was wanted for questioning in two car bombings and a fire at an Israeli preschool. Ali Mustapha got off way too easy.”

  MacLeod followed Avram. “And that makes him different than you exactly how?”

  Avram turned on MacLeod angrily. How could this man he once trusted be so blind? “He was a murdering bastard, MacLeod. I’m just—”

  “A murdering bastard.” MacLeod looked at Avram, searching. “Avram, when did ‘What is hateful to you do not do to anyone else’ become ‘Get them before they get you’? That’s not one of the commandments you used to follow.”

  “You do what you have to do to survive. That’s the only commandment we’ve got left, remember?” There was a time Avram would have given his life for this man. Now he could hardly stand the sight of him. “You remember Rivka, MacLeod? Cute little thing, always a fighter?”

  “Of course I do. I helped her get to Israel after the war. Then I … I had to move on.” Part of the penalty of Immortality, never being able to stay in someone’s life for very long. Never being able to stay and watch a young girl blossom into a woman. “We lost touch.”

  “I saw her not too long ago. Did you know she helped Antek and Zuvia start a Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz? She served three terms in the Knesset. An amazing woman. Now she’s raising hell in a retirement community outside Haifa. She thinks of Tzaddik has a heck of a grandson. And you …” Avram shook his head in amazement. “She still venerates you like some kind of prophet, MacLeod. Thank God she doesn’t know what you really are. It would break her heart.”