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“MacLeod.”

  “Ah, Duncan, thank goodness I caught you,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Marcus, where are you?”

  “I am so sorry, Duncan, but there’s been a slight emergency at the museum. I won’t be able to meet you for lunch.” Constantine’s voice was apologetic.

  “Come on, Marcus, what kind of ‘emergency’ can there be at an antiquities museum?”

  “You’d be surprised. At the moment I’m tied up to my ears in red tape.”

  MacLeod laughed. “Now there’s a pretty image.”

  “Funny,” he heard Constantine say. “Can you meet me at the museum just after closing?”

  “Sure, I suppose,” MacLeod began, “but what about—”

  “Perfect! Have to run, Duncan. See you at five.” Constantine hung up before MacLeod could finish.

  Great. He’d been stood up. It certainly wasn’t the first time, but on the rare occasions it had happened in the past, the person standing him up had usually been a bit more … shapely than Marcus Constantine. He took a drink from his glass. At least the wine was good. He looked around for the maître d’ to return the phone and found him at his podium near the entrance.

  “I’m sorry, Madame,” the maître d’ said in a practiced monotone to another patron as MacLeod set down the phone, “but without a reservation, I cannot seat you. C’est impossible,” and MacLeod realized he was addressing the same remarkable Arab woman he’d seen on the street.

  “You’re sure there is nothing you can do?” she asked, her French a bit hesitant but her voice as smooth and rich as her skin. She slipped the maître d’ a wad of francs.

  He handed them back to her in a huff. “No, Madame,” he said firmly, then walked away. MacLeod wondered if he’d been offended by the amount or by the thought of being bribed by a woman. Obviously disappointed, the woman put the money into a jacket pocket and turned to leave.

  “I think I can help,” MacLeod found himself saying almost before he realized it.

  She stopped and turned to him, her dark eyes taking in his finely chiseled features, his well-kempt ponytail, his body so obviously fit and muscular beneath the tailored blazer. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, clearly liking what she saw. “Yes?”

  “I …” Under the full power of her smile, he nearly found himself tongue-tied. Four hundred years of experience stripped away and for a solitary instant he was once again Duncan MacLeod the Chieftain’s son, pretty good with a sword but shy and awkward around the lassies. But only for an instant, then Duncan MacLeod the charmer kicked into action. “My lunch appointment just canceled and I’ve got a fantastic Hermitage that’d be a shame to waste. Care to join me?”

  “What if I told you I didn’t drink?” He could tell she was interested, testing him.

  “What if I confessed that was only a ruse so I might have the pleasure of your company?” He turned on his own thousandwatt smile and watched her reserve start to melt.

  “Well …”

  “I’ll be the perfect gentleman. Scout’s honor.”

  “I’m sure you will,” she relented, unable to resist those eyes. With a quick glance back toward the street, she offered MacLeod her hand, and he escorted her to his table. As they passed the maître d’, she smiled her most demure smile and gave him a little wave, startling the maître d’. “Arrogant little bigot,” MacLeod heard her mutter under her breath in Arabic as he ushered her to Constantine’s place.

  MacLeod looked back at the maître d’. “Don’t mind him. He’s French,” he said in Arabic. Then he switched to English, playing a hunch. “I’m sure he’s like that with everyone.”

  The woman sighed as she settled into her chair. “Maybe some days I’m just more paranoid than others.” Then she looked up at MacLeod with new appreciation, realizing he’d tricked her into answering him in English as well. “So, you know a little Arabic, Mr.… ?”

  “MacLeod. Duncan MacLeod. A little. And your English is impeccable, Miss,” he noticed a gold band on her finger, “Mrs.… ?”

  “Doctor Amina,” she stressed. “I’m … no longer married. And you may call me Maral.” The “r” rumbled in the back of her throat like a contented cat’s.

  “Maral,” he echoed. He liked the way that felt.

  The waiter approached their table and rattled off the day’s specials. Maral ordered “just a salade nicoise.” The waiter waited patiently for MacLeod to order, but MacLeod was admiring Maral’s hair. It was thick and long, caught in simple but elegant combs up onto her head, where it shone black as burnished jet in the Parisian sunlight. He had a sudden urge to reach out and gently remove the combs, to watch the hair cascade around her shoulders … “Duncan?” He loved the way she pronounced his name. “Doon-can?” Maral reached up and touched her hair self-consciously. “Were you planning on having any food with your wine?”

  “Right. Food.” MacLeod covered quickly. “I’ll have the dorade grillée and some pommes frites.” Then he dismissed the waiter and turned to Maral. “So you’re a doctor?”

  “PhD,” she replied. “Chairman of the Western Studies department at Bir Zeit University.”

  “In Israel?”

  She shrugged. “That depends on whom you ask. It’s in Ramallah, a little town on the West Bank. It’s where I was born.”

  “You’re Palestinian,” MacLeod said. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?” MacLead wasn’t prepared for the intensity of her defensiveness.

  “Your accent. I couldn’t quite place it.” He thought for a moment. “But you’ve spent some time in the States, haven’t you?”

  Maral bristled. “Would you like to see my identity papers? How about my travel permits?” As she busied herself with her water glass, MacLeod could feel a wall click into place between them. He’d obviously rubbed a sore wound.

  “Maral, I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. He turned his charm up a notch. “If you let me take my foot out of my mouth, I’ll make it up to you. Promise.” He smiled a wee smile, hoping she’d follow suit.

  After a long moment she finally did, her smile a little wry, her dark eyes a little sad. “I’m sorry, too, Duncan. I’m usually not like this. It’s the end of a very difficult, very disappointing week.” She looked beyond MacLeod toward the gothic spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, towering over the next block. “I just thought maybe Paris would be different somehow. I always thought that Paris would be magical.”

  “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.

&n
bsp; 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?”

  Chapter Two

  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.