Zealot (3 page)

“Maybe you just need to give Paris a chance. Magic can happen when you least expect it.”

He liked the way her eyes brightened with flecks of copper when she smiled. “When I was eleven, my father took a position
teaching political science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.” The way she pronounced the name made it sound
like a kingdom in a fairy tale. “He wanted to keep us safe from the trouble at home.”

As Maral spoke, MacLeod came to the sudden realization that he was being watched from the sidewalk.

“So I guess you could say I spent my formative years as a ‘Joisy Goil.’ ” Her attempt at a New Jersey accent made him laugh.
As he did, he subtly turned his chair to get a better view of his observer. Olive-skinned, dark glasses, bushy mustache, surveillance
earpiece. “I went to college at Rutgers, got my PhD from Columbia.” His first guess was that the man was a Watcher, one of
the secret society of mortals dedicated to observing and chronicling the Immortals, but he’d never seen a Watcher as badly
trained at surveillance as this guy was.

“What made you go back to Ramallah?” he prompted. He needed to keep her talking, didn’t want her to get alarmed.

“I needed to discover who I really was. I couldn’t turn my back on my people like my father had.”

“You mean you weren’t cut out to be a Bruce Springsteen song?” he added, glibly, his mind only half on their conversation.
It was obvious that whoever the guy was, he’d learned his surveillance technique from old Cold War spy movies. MacLeod was
waiting for him to start talking into his sleeve.

When Maral laughed, it reminded him of wind chimes. “I went home to teach. And then I met someone …” MacLeod’s mysterious
observer turned to the side to light a cigarette and MacLeod spotted the telltale bulge under his left arm that confirmed
this was no Watcher. Maybe the guy was inept, but he was deadly serious.

“Maral,” he interrupted her quickly, “hold that thought. I have to …” He gestured vaguely at the interior of the café. “I’ll
be right back.”

“Of course,” she said, and watched him sprint into the restaurant.

MacLeod made a beeline for the kitchen. The maître d’, seating a young couple at a table inside, called out to him with concern—“Monsieur?”—but
MacLeod kept moving, pushing past a waiter in the narrow aisle between tables, nearly upsetting a tray of drinks. He startled
the kitchen help as he slammed through the swinging doors and stalked into the kitchen.

“Are you lost, Monsieur?” a surprised busboy asked. The
sous
-chef made a move to stop him, but MacLeod was out the back door and into the alley beyond before anyone could reach him.

Slowly, cautiously, MacLeod crept along the side of the restaurant. He spotted his man leaning against a letterbox, smoking
with studied casualness. The gunman watched with great interest as the Chez Nous waiter brought their lunch to their table
on the patio. MacLeod slipped into the crowd of pedestrians on the sidewalk and, pulling from his pocket the notecard on which
he’d jotted the restaurant’s address, strode toward the letterbox as if he was going to mail it.

In front of the letterbox, he made a great show of dropping the card. Recognition dawned on the face of the gunman as MacLeod
bent down to pick it up. Before the gunman could react, MacLeod elbowed him sharply in the groin.

The man bent double in pain, howling. MacLeod delivered a roundhouse kick squarely in the man’s gut, driving him hard back
against the letterbox.

A well-placed hit to the back of the man’s neck dropped him neatly to the pavement before the passersby on the sidewalk were
even aware anything had happened.

MacLeod had the man’s gun almost before the gunman hit the ground. A passing tourist screamed at the sight of the automatic,
alerting everyone on the street and in the café as well, but MacLeod had eyes only for the battered gunman at his feet.

“Who are you?” MacLeod growled, pressing the automatic nearer the man’s face. “Why were you spying on me?” He tried again,
in Arabic this time. “
Shú ismak? Min wáyn inta?
” but still there was no response. The man simply closed his eyes, as if expecting MacLeod to pull the trigger.

Suddenly, MacLeod felt a hard ring of steel jammed in his own side, insistent. “Donn-can,” Maral’s purr pleaded in his ear,
“put the gun down. Please, put the gun down.” He could feel her hands shaking, felt her gun vibrate against his ribs. For
the safety of all of them, he decided to do as she said. He set the automatic on the pavement by the letterbox.

The man on the ground made a quick move toward it, intent on using it. Maral barked a sharp “
la!
”, no, and reached out her hand to help him gingerly to his feet. “Assad, Duncan MacLeod,” she said to him by way of perfunctory
introduction as she helped him up. Assad, in pain, held his ribs and glowered at MacLeod. To MacLeod she said, “Duncan, this
is Assad. My bodyguard.”

“Your WHAT?” MacLeod was livid.

Maral, hearing the distinctive whine of Parisian police cars in the distance and seeing the size of the crowd their little
drama had attracted, begged him, “Please, there’s been a horrible mistake. Let’s just go someplace quiet we can talk.”

“I think we’ve gone way beyond ‘mistake.’ ” MacLeod took her by the arm and led her off through the crowd, Assad lagging a
short distance behind. “This had better be good.”

“So it was all a lie? Bir Zeit? New Brunswick? All of it?” MacLeod paced angrily across the sumptuous lobby of the Hôtel Lutétia,
feeling used. Across the lobby Assad and an Arab gentleman in a traditional headdress were speaking with a
gendarme
, straightening out the little “misunderstanding” at Chez Nous. Maral, looking tired and worn, sat in an armchair near MacLeod,
trying to get him to understand.

“It
is
true. Every word of it.”

“So tell me again the part about how the schoolteacher conveniently forgot to mention she was a negotiator for the Palestinians,
with a gun in her handbag and an armed bodyguard.” He pulled her to her feet. He was in her face. He didn’t care.

Maral gave it right back to him. “What am I supposed to do? Announce to every Don Juan who comes on to me in a restaurant
‘I’m with the PLO! Come kill me and all my friends?’ It’s my job, Duncan, it’s not who I
am
.” He started to walk away from her. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back, looking him dead in the eyes. “Tell me
your
life’s an open book. You swoop in like James Bond, you take down Assad without even breathing heavy. Maybe there’s something
you’d like to tell me about Duncan MacLeod?”

He stared at her and realized she had him. She hadn’t told him she was a Palestinian diplomat in Paris to negotiate the future
of East Jerusalem with the Israelis, and he’d neglected to mention he was born in the Highlands of Scotland in 1592 and couldn’t
die unless someone took his head. In retrospect, he had to admit his was probably the more egregious omission. He led her
to a couch, the wind out of his sails, and they both sat. “Okay,” he said simply, “tell me about the gun.”

Maral wasn’t quite as ready to stop fighting. “I’m planning on hijacking a busload of schoolchildren, what did you think?”
MacLeod just gave her a long, long look, one that seemed to see right through the shield of her anger and into her soul. “I
just want to survive, Duncan,” she said. “Is that so much to ask for?” Her anger seemed to evaporate into his look and with
it her bravado, leaving her tired and looking just a little … lost. “The man who had this job before me was blown up in his
own car at a traffic light while taking his son to school, did you know that?” MacLeod had to shake his head, no. “I just
want to be around long enough to know I’ve started something that might someday stop the killing. More than anything, I want
peace—but I’m not stupid, and I’m not suicidal. There are a lot of crazies out there, on both sides. And 1 refuse to go down
like a sacrificial lamb. I’m no martyr, Duncan—does that make me evil?”

“No,” he said quietly, “no, it doesn’t.” He of all people could understand her plight, trying to do what she knew was right
while all around, it seemed, the whole world conspired to stop her. It was a battle he’d faced for four hundred years. He
looked into her coffee-colored eyes and felt a moment of intense connection between them. He started to put his free arm around
her shoulders to bring her close to him, wanting to kiss her, to seal their link. Instead, she pulled away and stood up, breaking
the bond. He looked at her, surprised—he knew from the look in her eyes she felt the spark, too.

“Not here. Not now,” she whispered. “Islam forbids it.” MacLeod thought back on his travels in the Arab world, and remembered
that public signs of affection between unmarried men and women were taboo. Some societies, he remembered, even refused to
let them speak to each other—and punished with death. He was amused to think that he, at his age and experience, would be
subject to those rules, but he nodded that he understood. Maral continued in a low voice. “We have several what you might
call ‘fundamentalists’ in our party. While I may not share all their beliefs, I must respect them. I have no wish to offend
them publicly.”

MacLeod nodded his understanding. “I should go.” He stood and started for the great revolving door that was the lobby’s entrance.

“Duncan, wait,” she called out to him as he walked away. He turned. “Will I see you again?”

“Dinner tomorrow?” Despite their rocky start, he found himself looking forward to spending some time one with this woman.

Maral beamed, flattered he would consider seeing her again after such a debacle. “I’d like that very much.”

“Great. What about your friend?” He gestured toward Assad.

“I think I can arrange to give Assad the night off.” She laughed as she walked MacLeod to the door. “After your little display
today, I don’t think I’ll be in much danger with the mighty Duncan MacLeod protecting me.”

“But who will protect you from Duncan MacLeod?” he teased, with a raised eyebrow and a wicked grin.

Maral gifted him with an alluring smile as he headed out the door. “Who says I want to be protected?”

Paris: The Present

The Musée National des Antiquités had risen up from the remains of a thousand-year-old abbey gutted and looted by the same
misguided crowds who had stormed the Bastille. The corridor, whose granite paving stones eerily amplified the sound of MacLeod’s
footsteps, was once the cloister-walk surrounding a garden where generations of monks had tilled the earth. Now the walk was
enclosed in glass and the garden planted not with medicinal herbs but with sculpture that would have scandalized the poor
monks—Grecian youths at play, a nymph and a shepherd boy celebrating the beauty of the human form, some of those lusty busty
women Rubens and his crowd had been so partial to nearly two thousand years later. Centuries of human history frozen in time
under the chisel of human genius.

MacLeod always felt that museums after hours took on the air of a crypt, a pregnant silence as if waiting for the dead to
arise. As his steps rang down the hall, MacLeod half expected the shepherd boy to come to life, or the monks to return to
claim what once was theirs. Irrational, he knew; but, then, not everything in life was rational. He approached the entrance
at the end of the corridor, two massive wooden doors hand-carved and blackened with age that once separated the garden from
the monks’ quarters. Wary as he was in the eerie atmosphere of the deserted museum, he was not prepared for the ancient doors
to spring open on their own as he reached out to touch them.

MacLeod stepped back quickly, waiting until the doors had opened fully. As he did, he sensed the presence of another Immortal.
He stepped through with caution. Most likely Constantine, he thought, but it never paid to drop your guard until you were
sure.

“Marcus?” he called out, looking around. There was no response.

The old monks’ quarters had been completely destroyed in the violence following the Revolution and in its place the Musée
National des Antiquités had created an immense hall of marble in the Classical style, part of nineteenth-century architecture’s
sad attempt to recreate the splendor of the ancient world. MacLeod had trouble envisioning a display of Monet’s works installed
in this room, or the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe—although, come to think of it, there were a few of Henry Moore’s more
amorphous sculptures he thought might feel at home here.

For Constantine’s new exhibition, however, the room was perfect. Two Corinthian columns secured a large banner bearing the
name of the exhibit in precise Latin lettering:
Hostes Romae—Hostiae Romae
. Rome’s Enemies—Rome’s Victims.

Passing under the banner, MacLeod approached a freestanding stone archway built in the style of the Roman triumphal arches
he remembered from his days in Italy with Hugh Fitzcairn. He smiled, remembering the morning after the duke’s wedding, waking
up barely clothed on the top of one such arch near the ruins of the Forum, Fitz nowhere to be found and him with one hell
of a headache, wondering how the devil he’d managed to get up there. Or how the devil he’d get down. Then along came Fitz
with a hay wagon. Good old Fitz.