Zealot (35 page)

But MacLeod was still in pain. He struggled to force his eyes open and the night sky he faced was full of smoke and debris.
He tried to turn his head—muscles and bones alike protested as he moved—and he could see figures move in the smoke. He knew
he had to get up, to move away from the site of the explosion before anyone found him, before he was forced to explain, but
his spine and his legs could not yet bear his weight. He pulled himself along the ground, half crawl, half drag, every inch
new agony, until he reached a stand of bushes. He managed to roll beneath them, out of sight, and he lay there without moving,
eyes closed, waiting for the healing, feeling the pain slowly start to recede.

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 finds out you should have been
blown to Hell.”

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.