Zealot

  Scant minutes after the blast, the driveway in front of the embassy was pandemonium. Emergency vehicles clogged the roadway, spilling over onto the manicured lawns, leaving little room for the limousines and government cars attempting to spirit away the officials from the signing ceremony. Stunned delegates wandered in the midst of the equally shocked press corps, their faces ashen in the flashing lights of the fire trucks as they transmitted their reports across the world, and Farid’s security men were desperate to herd together their charges and evacuate them to safety.

  Farid had Maral tightly by the wrist, and she fought him hard, trying to escape. “No! Let me go!” she screamed out.

  The security chief didn’t want to hurt her, but his duty was clear. “You have to go. There are assassins everywhere. You’re not safe.” He escorted her firmly away from the embassy building, leading her, dragging her.

  Still she struggled to get away from him. “No! Duncan’s out there. I have to find him.” Even Farid’s veneer of cold professionalism could not help but be touched by her impassioned plea, but he knew there might be little left to find. Even so, he offered her what comfort he could.

  “We’ll find him, Doctor. I promise you, we’ll find him.” He opened the door to a waiting security car. “Now get in the car,” he said firmly, forcing her in.

  “Farid, you don’t understand. I have to see him. I have to know!” she begged him through tears. His only response was to shut the car door and signal the driver to drive on. He turned back to the chaos.

  The car moved forward several yards, then was forced to stop and wait as another company of fire equipment arrived at the scene, a hook and ladder blocking the gated entrance. Maral saw her chance and threw the door open, scrambling out of the car, taking off at a run back to the embassy. The driver sounded his hom frantically to get Farid’s attention, but in the midst of the sirens and the crowd, it was just another blare of noise.

  Maral ran around the back of the emergency vehicles, careful to stay away from the building, out of Farid’s radar. She stayed in the shadows of the perimeter fence as it ran parallel with the front of the building, then cut across a crowded parking area, ducking beneath the tops of the cars, until she reached the garden that ran alongside the eastern side of the embassy, where the bomb had detonated.

  She slowed her pace, horrified at the damage she could see. A twenty-foot hole had been clawed into the side of the embassy, sections of two floors lay open to the night air. Inside, she could see the first firefighters on the scene crawling carefully through the smoldering debris that used to be someone’s office. Outside the hole, a massive crater had been gouged in the carefully tended lawn. She was stunned. If that had gone off during the crowded signing … Duncan MacLeod had saved hundreds of lives.

  Duncan …

  She ran on, weaving through the rescue equipment, smoke and tears threatening to blind her as she scanned the garden, the firefighters, the debris for any sign of MacLeod. She found the window he’d crashed through a few short yards from the gaping wound in the embassy.

  “Duncan!” she screamed, trying to be heard above the din of the emergency vehicles and the rescuers, trying to be heard in Heaven if that’s where he was now. “Duncan!” She dropped to her knees, heedless of the broken glass all around, searching for any trace.

  She’d crawled several feet beyond the window when she found blood pooling on the grass. “God, please, no,” Maral whispered. She reached out, almost touching it, then pulled back. Glimmering in the moonlight in a black pool of blood she saw one of MacLeod’s golden cuff links.

  “DUNCAN!!!!” she wailed as if her heart was bursting. Clutching the bloody cuff link tightly in her fist, she rocked back and forth, back and forth, sobbing his name. She had let him into her soul and let him rip open the scar tissue that had formed around Ali’s death, and now she grieved for both of them as if both wounds were still raw and bleeding. “Duncan … “

  * * *

  As if in a dream, he heard his name. Carefully, he opened his eyes, tested his body. Arms, Legs, Head. All seemed to move in the ways they were originally designed to. He rolled to his side beneath the bushes. The effort exhausted him, but he noted the pain was nearly gone. He looked down at himself. Covered in blood, clothing in tatters, but the cuts and rends and punctures that had peppered his body were finally beginning to heal. Then he heard his name again, realized it wasn’t a dream.

  From his sanctuary, he could see Maral not fifty feet away, moaning her grief to the heavens. His heart was torn—he knew he should wait and disappear into the night, leave Paris, leave this life, let them all think he’d died in the blast. It would be simpler for everyone. But as he watched Maral, saw the despair in every inch of her body, heard the devastation in her voice, something in his heart told him no. He couldn’t leave her like that. Once again alone, once again not knowing, waiting for the phone call that in this case would never come.

  MacLeod rolled out from under the stand of bushes. “Maral,” he called out, first making sure there was no one else in earshot. All the rescue activity seemed focused nearer the front of the building where he could see the tremendous hole. “Maral,” he called a little louder.

  Somehow, through her anguish, she heard him. She turned, startled, and from the look on her face he could almost see her soul come back to life as she saw him, stumbled to her feet, ran to him. “Duncan!”

  Maral dropped to her knees beside him and MacLeod sat up to meet her. She threw her arms around him in great relief, and although he tried not to, he winced a bit at her touch on some still open wounds. Pulling back from him, she took in the blood, his tattered clothing. Cautiously, she reached out to touch a jagged, bloody gash dangerously close to his right eye. “You’re hurt. I’ll get help.” She moved to stand.

  “No!” MacLeod barked, grabbing her arm to stop her. Then, more gently, “Maral, no.” It was hard for him to know what to say to her, how to tell her, so he settled for, “Wait.”

  “But—” she began to protest, but the beseeching look in his eyes made her hesitate. He took her hand and placed it where it had been, near the angry slash by his eye.

  “Wait.”

  And then she realized that the cut was not nearly as bad or as deep as she’d first believed. A trick of the light in her excitement. But even as she thought that, she noticed that the wound had narrowed, the swelling receding. “Duncan … ?” she said, fear battling with curiosity in her voice.

  MacLeod took her hand from his face and held it between both of his. “Maral, I can explain,” he started, meeting her eyes gravely. “There are things I need to tell you.”

  She pulled her hand away and touched his temple again, gently stroking where the wound had been, feeling for herself the soft perfect skin concealing where his face had been ravaged moments before. “My grandfather would say you’re one of the Djinn,” she said, awestruck. “Or a guardian angel sent from Allah.”

  MacLeod shook his head. “Assad was your guardian angel, Maral. I’m just a man. But I’m …” It was always so hard to on up and confess the truth, to live through that longest moment in the world as she took in his words, worked through the anger, worked through the revulsion, and came either to accept or despise him. For good or ill, their relationship would never be the same. It might have been kinder to both of them if he had just disappeared. He took a deep breath. “Maral, I am…”

  She kissed him hard on the lips to silence him. “Don’t explain,” she said as she released him. “Whatever it is, I don’t need to know. I just need to know you’re safe.”

  “Maral, are you sure?” He had made up his mind he would tell her if she wanted to know.

  She nodded, her eyes filled with unshed tears of relief. “You’re here. That’s all that matters.”

  He kissed her again. She would never cease to amaze him. “Thank you,” he said from the heart.

  Maral helped him to stand. “Now let’s see if we can get you out of here before anyone else fin
ds out you should have been blown to Hell.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Paris: The Present

  In the end, it had taken Farid’s assistance to get them out of the Israeli compound unseen. Farid, who, if MacLeod had thought him actually capable of emotion, looked distinctly happy to see MacLeod in one piece—or at least relieved MacLeod hadn’t died on his watch. Farid, who understood implicitly the meaning of “no questions asked.”

  Once Maral was safely behind the gates of the Jordanian Embassy again, MacLeod returned to his barge. He showered the blood from his body and changed his clothes—black jeans, black sweater, black coat. It was the deepest part of the night, and a bone-chilling cold had settled over the Seine. A light fog had begun to condense along the water. He went up on deck and climbed to the roof of the pilothouse where he sat, sword across his lap, waiting. He could issue no plainer invitation.

  Vigil. MacLeod sat in silence under the stars, unmoving, trying to empty his heart and mind of distraction and concentrate solely on the task before him, but he dreaded what he knew he had to do. He’d come close to killing Avram once that night, and he wasn’t certain it was only the threat of the bomb that had stayed his hand from the final strike.

  MacLeod was raised to protect his people, and it was a lesson that Ian MacLeod had instilled deep within his son’s soul, so deep that, four hundred years later, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod was still bearing that onus on his shoulders. He had killed for his clan and died for his clan, and he of all men could understand what it meant to put your responsibility to your people ahead of everything—ahead of love, ahead of happiness, ahead of life.

  And he, too, had witnessed horror. Not on a scale that could ever rival what Avram had been forced to face, but horror that had eaten away at his soul and his mind all the same. He had seen his people slaughtered by a heartless nation bent on their annihilation, men, women, children made to suffer and to die on the bloody fields of Culloden and in their homes and in their churches and wherever else the English bastards could track them down.

  And he had vowed they would pay. He would make them pay. And he, like Avram, had vowed “never again”—not as long as there was breath in Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. He’d butchered men as their wives screamed to him for mercy. He’d killed them in front of the eyes of their crying children. He’d murdered men whose only crime was to be born in the land he despised more than Hell itself. Perhaps the only difference between himself and Avram was that Ceirdwyn had found a way to reach him, to stop the killing, without resorting to the sword. And MacLeod had failed to do that for Avram.

  Who was he to say the Palestinians weren’t as much a threat to Avram and his way of life as the Nazis were? He was an outsider. He’d lived in Avram’s world only a brief time—and back then he was more than willing to kill as many Germans as he could to try and save Avram’s people—they were his people, too, they were his clan for the time he was there. Certainly in Avram’s mind, this threat seemed as real. To Avram, losing Hebron, losing East Jerusalem, could only remind him of the Jews losing their shops and their homes prior to the deportations, the expulsions, the ovens.

  Who was Duncan MacLeod to proclaim that the Nazis were evil … Cumberland’s English were evil … but the Palestinians, they’re not evil? And then expect Avram Mordecai, a Jew from Biblical Palestine, a man fifteen hundred years older than he, with different experiences, different values, different morals, to bend to his judgement? Who was he to decree what constituted evil for anyone but himself?

  Maybe only God could do that.

  Maybe only God could judge Avram. But MacLeod knew, right or wrong, he had to stop Avram before more mortals died. Israeli mortals. Palestinian mortals. Their race, their religion, their politics didn’t matter.

  And maybe someday God would judge MacLeod for that act, as well. But until that day of reckoning came, he could live with the knowledge that no more innocents would die at Avram’s hand.

  MacLeod didn’t have to wait long for his invitation to be answered. Still more than an hour before sunrise, he felt Avram approach, saw him along the foggy Quai.

  “You failed,” MacLeod pointed out, as Avram came within earshot.

  “You win some, you lose some.” Avram’s demeanor was calm, resigned. “Arafat and the Prime Minister signed the agreement in the back of the security van after they evacuated the embassy. Guess I pushed them into each other’s arms.” He approached the gangplank. “It’s only one battle. You have to fight a lot of battles to win a war. There’ll be others.” Despite his words, he seemed less than enthusiastic at the prospect.

  MacLeod shook his head, standing. “Not for you, Avram.” He climbed down from the top of the pilothouse.

  “Guess we have to finish this,” Avram said. MacLeod nodded his head, sad but resolved. Avram tried one more time to get his old friend to understand. “Duncan, you know why I had to do it.” He started up the gangplank.

  “And you know why I have to stop you.” The katana was heavy in his hands.

  “’Cause you’ll always be the white knight, goy, champion to damsels in distress everywhere.” Avram pulled his sword and leapt from the gangplank onto the deck of the barge. “C’mon, hero,” he challenged, darting to the flat open deck of the bow, “let’s go. Time for the O.K. Corral.”

  In two long strides, MacLeod was there, and, with no formality, he laid into Avram, three quick slashes to Avram’s head. Avram’s sword was ready to deflect, deflect, then he twisted out of MacLeod’s reach.

  Avram circled to MacLeod’s left, tried to thrust in behind his blade, but the katana that had saved MacLeod’s life more times than he could remember was already there, waiting to block the blow. MacLeod spun to face him and pressed a flurry of attacks—hip, head, head, thrust—that drove Avram back, then back again as he struggled to defend against the powerhouse blows.

  He realized MacLeod was maneuvering the fight into the narrow prow of the barge. The boat’s hull and the collection of pipes and winches and equipment would negate what little advantage his natural agility gave Avram against MacLeod’s superior sword skills.

  Avram feinted at MacLeod’s legs, drawing the katana down, then an overhead slice at the head, to lure the katana into a defensive position perpendicular to MacLeod’s body. Quickly, he slipped inside MacLeod’s guard, catching the katana’s blade at the hilt and, putting all his weight and strength behind it, he powered his sword down and away, dragging the tip of the katana into the deck of the barge.

  Avram jumped back quickly and swung before MacLeod could raise the sword back into proper position to defend. He caught MacLeod across the right arm, a wicked slash that severed the tendons. First blood, and a much-needed advantage. He slipped out of the narrow confines of the barge’s prow.

  MacLeod spun away, howling, but he held firm to the sword with his left hand. While the katana wielded two-handed was a powerful killing weapon, one-handed it was still formidable. Holding his damaged arm close to his body, MacLeod spun the sword expertly in his hand to show Avram he had gained no advantage, then attacked aggressively.

  They battled across the deck of the barge, MacLeod on the attack. Again and again, Avram found himself forced to retreat to what he hoped was a better position. With a roar and a mighty slash of his sword, MacLeod locked blades with Avram and pressed him back against the raised roof of the living space belowdecks. To avoid falling, Avram scrambled on top and over it, running nimbly across the narrow passage between the pilothouse and the side of the barge, MacLeod on his heels.

  Reaching the stem, Avram stood his ground, sword ready, waiting for MacLeod’s attack. He was winded, on the defensive, and the edge of the barge, where the dark Seine beckoned to shield his escape, was tantalizingly close. But he was not going to take the coward’s way out—one way or the other, they were going to finish this.

  Grimly, MacLeod came at him, to the head, to the gut, to the shoulder. Even Avram’s quickness was not enough, and he took a painfu
l slice across the collarbone. He howled with the pain and tried to dart away, but MacLeod was right on him.

  As MacLeod swung again, Avram ducked to a crouch and came up under the larger man’s guard. He shouldered MacLeod into the side of the pilothouse, and the sword went flying from MacLeod’s hand.

  Avram pressed in closer, going for the kill. An instant later he found himself on his ass, swordless, the katana to his neck. In one seamless move, MacLeod had caught the katana midair with his healed right arm and pulled Avram’s feet from under him with a sweep of his leg.

  “Duncan!” Avram gasped, and the plea in his voice made MacLeod stay his hand. Avram held him with his eyes for a long moment. Then he folded his hands in front of him and closed his eyes in prayer. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, Whose judgments are true.” Then, with a sigh, he tilted back his head, exposing his throat.

  MacLeod could feel the tears rise up in his throat. “Shalom, Avram. Peace.” The keen edge of the katana sliced cleanly.

  Avram’s body fell to the deck of the barge, and, a moment later, the katana followed, as if its owner could no longer bear to hold the weapon that had slain his former comrade. The gentle breeze along the Seine stirred into a wind that caused currents of fog to dance around the barge.

  The shattered vessel that was Avram gave up its Quickening like wisps of smoke which curled into the air, intertwining with the dancing fog. Suddenly, the wind became a gale, the dance a frenzy, as the Quickening writhed in the whirl-wind, then sought shelter in Duncan MacLeod.

  Its touch was the touch of liquid fire that seeped through his pores and overwhelmed his soul, stripping away all that he was, all that he is, all that he would be, and leaving in its place an acute, never-ending loneliness that filled him up until he could hold no more. He fell to his knees from the ache and a deep moan, torn from the very fiber of his being, escaped from his throat.