Zealot Page 10

  Avram sat back on his heels, stunned, no longer struggling against his bonds. “I cannot die?” he repeated, wary. “Never?”

  There were terms and conditions they would get into later, but for the moment that would suffice. “Never,” Constantine confirmed. “You’ve seen so yourself.” He cut Avram’s bonds with the iron knife, and Avram scrambled away from him, moving to the woman’s by.

  Avram pulled the veil from Deborah’s head and gazed longingly at her lifeless face. “Never?” he asked again, his voice filled with anguish.

  “Accept the gift, Jew. We are blessed by the gods. We will live forever—Immortal.”

  “Blessed? I’m cursed, don’t you see? Cursed by God.” He clutched Deborah’s body tightly to his own. “God in Heaven, what have I done to you to deserve this?” He rocked her cold body back and forth, back and forth, tears welling in his eyes. “Deborah!” he bellowed in a voice he hoped would crack Heaven. “Deborah!”

  Paris: The Present

  “I don’t think Avram ever got over Deborah. How he’d lost her. How he’d betrayed her. And how he’d betrayed his God. Over and over, I heard about how he’d betrayed God by not dying. I remember thinking at the time what a demanding God that young man had. But now I know it’s Avram who’s the demanding one.” Constantine paused a moment, then continued. “I took Avram and we left Judaea not long after. I’ve never been back. And I’ve never been able to get the images of Masada out of my head.”

  “I don’t know how anyone could,” MacLeod concurred.

  Constantine picked up the sword box and led the way out of the Temple room. “But that’s not actually what you were asking about, was it? You wanted to know about Israel now, not Israel then.”

  MacLeod followed him back through the exhibit. “Don’t you have to understand one to understand the other?”

  “If more people realized that, Duncan, maybe we wouldn’t still be debating the future of Palestine two thousand years later.”

  A flock of wayward children came running down the aisle, screaming and laughing. MacLeod dodged out of their way and they swirled around Constantine like an ocean wave engulfing a rock. Behind them, a harried teacher’s aide called out, “Stop! It’s time to leave.” But the children paid her no mind as they pushed past Constantine toward the next exhibit.

  “FREEZE!”

  And the voice that had commanded a hundred generations of fighting men to his will reverberated through the marble hall like the voice of God. The children froze in their tracks, silenced by the general’s order.

  With a grateful look, the teacher’s aide gathered her charges. “Come, the bus is waiting,” she told them, and they followed her toward the exit in a quiet and orderly fashion.

  Constantine shrugged and gestured for MacLeod to follow him into the next cubicle of the exhibition, the room with the case containing Nefertiri’s sarcophagus. “Hold this.” He handed the sword box to MacLeod, then opened the locked cabinet. Carefully, he removed the gleaming short sword from the box and attached two lengths of nylon monofilament to the terminals of the hilt, suspending the sword in the space reserved for it.

  “You were pretty certain I’d come through on this, Marcus,” MacLeod noted, and Constantine just smiled, knowingly.

  The jangle of MacLeod’s cell phone added to the general clamor in the gallery. He flipped it open. “MacLeod.”

  “Doon-can?” her voice purred velvet in his ear.

  “Maral,” he said, and watched Constantine raise an indulgent eyebrow at the softening of his voice. “Are you all right?”

  He could hear her sigh through the phone. “Arafat left the negotiation in a huff and the Israeli foreign minister broke off the session. I need … I don’t know what I need …”

  “How about a hug? For a start.” Constantine’s face broke into an almost patronizing smile, and MacLeod waved him away.

  “That would be lovely,” she agreed. “But they won’t let me out. I’m suffocating here. Can you rescue me?”

  “One knight in shining armor, coming right up.”

  “Really? You’ll help me?” The joy in her voice was clear even over the ragged cellular connection.

  “Daring rescues, my specialty. I’m on my way. Wear comfortable shoes.” MacLeod toggled off the phone and turned to Constantine, who was grinning with fatherly pride. “I think I’ll be going now.”

  “I won’t wait up.”

  “You don’t have to be so smug,” MacLeod said, starting from the room.

  “You don’t have to look so happy,” Constantine countered, as MacLeod left.

  Chapter Eight

  Tel Aviv, Israel: The Present

  The four o’clock train from Haifa was late. The four o’clock train from Haifa was always late. Inside the crowded Arlozorov Railway Station, it was stifling hot. The antiquated air-conditioning system was out of commission again, as it so often was, and Avram, seated on a bench near the gate where the train from Haifa would someday arrive, berated himself for his choice of garb.

  Heavy black suit, black overcoat, black-rimmed spectacles, black felt hat pulled low and tight around his ears to conceal his close-cropped hair and anchor the false prayer curls he wore, he was traveling as one of the ultra-orthodox haredim, one of the “black hats” as they were known colloquially throughout Israel. Packed tightly on the bench between an enormous Jewish matron and an unwashed European backpacker, he was certain he was dying. If it was the purpose of the “black hats” to suffer before God, they succeeded admirably. He admired their discipline, but wanted nothing more than to strip off the oppressive black wool and plunge into the Mediterranean, so blue and inviting just a little over a mile away.

  The arrival of the train brought some relief as his seatmates hurried off to meet it. Avram stayed where he was, his briefcase on his lap, watching from beneath the brim of his hat as the passengers just off the train from Haifa passed through the gate and into the railway station. Businessmen mostly, returning from a day of transacting business in the northern city. A number of tourists rushed through the station, afraid to miss their connection to Jerusalem. More backpackers, French and Italian, off in search of the youth hostel. As the surge of people off the train began to thin, he spotted a small group of Israeli soldiers in uniform, three men and a woman, coming through the gate with duffel bags slung over their backs. Avram watched them pass his position, laughing and joking with each other in that easy camaraderie that’s forged in the trenches. As they started to exit the railway station, he picked up his briefcase and followed them out.

  The four walked to a nearby bus stop, Avram not far behind them. After a brief wait in the blazing sun, the bus arrived and the soldiers boarded along with a handful of civilians. Avram followed, choosing a seat near the front of the bus behind the driver, away from the soldiers who sat at the back. The bus was nearly full, but at least the air-conditioning was working. There was no room for his briefcase on the crowded seat beside him, so he slid it under his seat. Several of Avram’s fellow passengers looked at him curiously. It wasn’t every day that they saw one of the black hats on the streets of very secular Tel Aviv—many of the haredim considered the city a modern Sodom or Gomorrah. Good. Avram had counted on being noticed.

  The bus ran west, away from central Tel Aviv and into the western suburbs. The line terminated near the Ben Gurion National Defense Base, where the soldiers were returning from their Passover leave. There had been no Tel Aviv when Avram was young, just a few fishing villages near the already ancient port of Jaffa. When he’d returned to liberate his homeland after World War II, the tiny hamlet founded by struggling Zionists only fifty years earlier was already a city. Now nearly a third of Israel lived in the sprawling metropolis. As the bus continued on into the suburbs, picking up and discharging passengers along its way, Avram noted that throughout the world, one modern cement suburb looked pretty much like any other.

  Several stops from the military base, the last civilian got off the bus. Now only Av
ram and the soldiers remained. He chanced a look at them from beneath his hat. They were so young, all of them. Soldiers always were. One of the men looked even younger than Avram did. He probably didn’t need to shave yet, either. Why was it always the young, so vibrant and full of potential, who were sacrificed so the old could survive?

  He caught the eye of the woman, who smiled at him, teeth white against her tawny skin. Avram noticed how attractive she looked in her olive uniform, dark hair pulled back beneath her cap, but he resisted the temptation to return her smile. While Avram had supported a young woman’s right to fight for her country since the liberation and had fought side by side with many he’d been proud to serve with, to the black hats she was anathema. He turned away from her pointedly.

  It was always regrettable when soldiers had to die in war. But these Israeli soldiers, like those who had gone before them, like Avram himself, had stood among the ghosts of Masada as new Israeli recruits, had sworn the oath of allegiance to their homeland—”Never again”—and vowed to fight and to die in her defense. As long as Israel was threatened, such sacrifice would be necessary.

  Avram reached up and pulled the cord, signaling his intention to leave the bus at the next stop. When the bus began to slow, Avram stood and moved toward the door as the stop neared. He looked through the glass door and stopped cold. Two young girls stood at the stop in front of a corner market carrying a cat in a small cage.

  Avram took a deep, calming breath, then reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a large handful of coins. The bus pulled up to the curb and the driver opened the doors. Avram started down the top step, then tripped over his own feet, sprawling onto the pavement below. Coins clattered away in all directions.

  “Please, children, can you help me?” he begged piteously, crawling on the ground to retrieve his shekels. To his vast relief, the older girl, almost a teenager, set down the cat carrier to chase after the coins, and soon her younger sister helped as well. Avram waved the bus driver on with a smile.

  After the girls handed him the coins they had gathered, Avram thanked them. “And I’m so very sorry I made you miss your bus, girls,” he said, handing them each a ten-shekel piece. “Here, you should take a taxi.” He reached through the bars of the cage with one hand and began to scratch their cat under the chin. It purred against his hand. With his other hand, he reached into the pocket of his long black coat and pressed the “record” button on a small tape recorder there. “I’m told taxis are much safer than public buses.” The resulting explosion as his briefcase detonated blocks away shattered the windows of the market behind them.

  Chapter Nine

  Paris: The Present

  The room was large, larger than her entire apartment back in Ramallah, and it commanded a lovely view of the Square Boucicaut just outside the Lutétia. Maral knew every inch of the view by heart, the way the light of the setting sun traveled across the marble fountain and played in the spurting waters, the patterns of the pair of pigeons nesting between the ears of a bronze horse bearing the effigy of some dead French king. She’d eaten most of her meals by these windows—but not too near, thank you, Farid—taking in as much of Paris as she could from the confines of the narrow panes of glass.

  Art nouveau monopolized the decor of the room, a style she’d never been partial to. There was nothing homey about this place she was forced to call home. She knew she was supposed to consider herself fortunate. Paris hotel rooms were notoriously small—she heard the usually stalwart Assad complaining he was barely able to open his suitcase in the tiny room he’d been given. Part of her envied him his cozy accommodations. Her room was dominated by a huge bed hung with heavy draperies, a bed so tall a mahogany stairstep was provided. She found any bed lonely since Ali’s death, and this monster doubly so. When she was one and awake in the middle of the night, she felt very much like the princess and the pea, a nagging thought in the back of her mind that someday they’d discover she wasn’t a real princess and send her back to her classroom.

  Maral had no delusions about why she’d been selected for the negotiating team. She was raw and untried, the junior member of the team, but she was secular and she was female, an important symbol to the Western world, which believed that all Palestinians were intractable religious fanatics with rags on their heads and automatic weapons in their hands. Token symbol or not, she was determined to make her presence felt. If true peace were ever to be created in her homeland, it would come not from the religious bickerings of the fanatics of either faith, but from those who could step back and see those seated on the other side of the table as people, not ideologies. And it would hold not because of posturing warriors showing off the size of their manhood, but because of women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, women sick of burying their husbands and their brothers and their sons, women who became mothers who would instill the message of peace in their children and their children’s children.

  More than one of the old-school Palestinian diplomats she worked with called her naive, treated her like an impetuous daughter. They could patronize her all they wanted—she knew she was having an impact. Hers was the voice of reason that had kept them at the table when more extremist minds threatened to shatter the fragile understanding they’d managed to cobble together. Hers, the hand that had slipped what they dismissed as “womanly” concerns like education for the children and health care for the poor and displaced into a platform more concerned with the placement of guns and the movement of troops. As long as she knew Arafat supported her, she had no qualms against butting heads with the stodgiest of the traditionalists.

  But it was lonely work. And lately, its only reward had been coming back to this lifeless room, after a long, hard day at the table, to watch the pigeons play in the square. The few times she’d been able to venture out into Paris shone like bright jewels in the bleak memory of the past two weeks of negotiations, and that mysterious Duncan MacLeod seemed to be at the heart of them.

  She didn’t know what she was expecting when she called him. Just to hear his voice, really. Just to talk to someone who didn’t give a damn which side of Suleiman Street was the border or who would guard the Garden Tomb. When he said he would come to see her, her heart was lighter than it had been since she’d left Ramallah. She’d changed clothes twice since, and finally settled on a pair of tailored slacks and a silk tunic in shades of rust and cinnamon that she knew highlighted her skin and brought out her eyes. She hoped a pair of suede loafers would satisfy his request for comfortable shoes.

  As the sun went down, there was a knock on her hotel room door. She got up quickly from her perch near the window and moved toward the door. A voice called out, “Room service!”

  Oh. “I didn’t call for room service,” she answered, disappointed.

  “No, no, madame,” the voice outside protested in Pakistani-flavored French. “You put in your order about three hours ago. The kitchen has been backed up.”

  Three hours ago? She threw the door open. In a crisp waiter’s uniform and fake mustache, Duncan MacLeod stood behind a room-service cart covered in white linen. “Room service!” he announced with a bright smile and a wave of his hand over the contents of the cart, inclining his head to one side a bit to indicate the security men posted down the hall by the elevators.

  Maral gestured for him to enter, managing to keep from laughing until she’d closed and locked the door behind him. “What are you doing?”

  “You ordered a rescue, madame,” he said in his outrageous fake accent. “Here at the Hôtel Lutétia, we aim to please. Would you like that rescue for here or to go?”

  “To go? You mean, out of the hotel?” She knew that’s what she had asked for, but she hadn’t actually dreamed it possible.

  “Well, technically, it wouldn’t be much of a rescue if we just stayed here,” he said, resuming his normal, charming voice.

  “But how?”

  He lifted the linen skirt around the room service cart and indicated the empty platform below with an ex
pansive gesture. “One getaway vehicle, at your service.”

  “You think of everything, don’t you?”

  “I try,” he said with a modest shrug. “What do you say, game for a little adventure?”

  She was torn. A good little girl would stay in her room alone, safe, secure, content to watch the pigeons. But she was so tired of being everyone’s good little girl. A little adventure … One look at his face—caring, inviting—and her decision was made. “I should leave Assad a note, tell him not to worry.” She pulled hotel stationery and a pen from the desk, scribbling as she talked. “I get a wake-up call at six-thirty in the morning. Usually no one tries to contact me until then, but just in case, I’ll let him know I’m with you.” She propped the note up on the pillows of her enormous bed and grabbed her coat and purse from a nearby chair.

  MacLeod had taken the food and service items from the cart, so it would appear he had left her with her dinner. Only the metal plate covers remained to be returned to the kitchen. “Ready?” he asked, reaching for her hand.

  “As I’ll ever be,” she answered, as he helped her into the cart. She curled up in a fetal position on the low shelf, clutching coat and purse to her, and he lowered the linen cloth back down to cover her. She could see nothing but the shadows of his legs through the cloth as he began to push the cart from the room.

  They rumbled down the hallway and then stopped, at the service elevator she guessed. “Garcon,” she heard a man say in accented French. One of the security guards. She held her breath. “When will you bring our food?”

  When MacLeod spoke, it was in his odd, vaguely Pakistani accent, and she bit her lip so as not to laugh. “I do not know, monsieur, but I will go down immediately and ask the chef.” The elevator arrived, and he pushed the cart in. “Bonsoir! Bonsoir!” he piped cheerfully to the guards as the doors closed.