Zealot Read online

MacLeod touched her hand across the table. “I suspect you are neither old nor a fool.”

  “Ah, but don’t forget stubborn.” She turned her hand over so that his palm rested in hers, then held his hand. “So, now I have bared my soul to you, it’s your turn.” Her purring voice, her chocolate eyes flecked with gold, the way she stroked the back of his hand, she was certainly persuasive, and even the sudden arrival of the first course would not deter her from her request. As the owner left the table, she pinned MacLeod’s hand beneath hers when he tried to reach for his fork. “Tell me about Duncan MacLeod.” Stubborn she was, indeed.

  “Not much to tell, really. I own a small barge on the Quai de la Tournelle. Cold in the winter, but you can’t beat the view. I run a dojo back in the States. I like to read. I like to run.” He gave her a little self-deprecating grin. “I’m really rather boring, when you get right down to it.”

  “Yes, I know these things. You have a martial-arts studio that barely breaks even, you have no other visible means of support apart from dabbling a bit in antiques. And despite that, you always pay your taxes on time, and you give extremely generously to charities, especially those involving orphaned children. Your last traffic ticket was two years ago. You have no criminal record, yet your name seems to come up quite frequently as a witness in police records, which tells me you are a ‘do-gooder’ with an overgrown curiosity.”

  MacLeod rolled his eyes. “Your Farid does good work.”

  “I asked him to. And while all that interests me, it still tells me nothing about Duncan MacLeod. Tell me how he feels, tell me how he thinks.”

  “He thinks your food is getting cold and you should eat it before the main course arrives,” MacLeod said, picking up his fork. He tore into his choucroute with great relish. “Otherwise, we may offend our host,” he continued between bites.

  Maral seemed to give in, taking a few dainty bites. Then she said, with studied casualness, “ ‘MacLeod’—your family is English, then?”

  “Scottish,” he corrected her through a mouthful.

  She took another careful bite. “Scottish, English, there’s not really a difference anymore, is there? I mean, after all, it all belongs to England now.”

  “There is too a difference,” he explained. “The Scots didn’t give up their identity just because the English took the land. There’s a lot of dead Scots who wouldn’t take kindly to being called English. A lot of live ones, too.” Then he realized he’d walked right into her web.

  Placing her elbows firmly on the table, Maral leaned across toward him and gave him a blistering smile. The light in her eyes was positively wicked. “Gotcha.”

  Humph. “If I’d known there would be a test, I would have studied,” he groused good-naturedly.

  “Call it a pop quiz,” she said. “You seem to know your genealogy, so tell me: How long had there been MacLeods tending their sheep in Scotland before the English came? Before some English lord suddenly owned all the sheep pastures just because some foreign king said so and made your ancestors tenants on their own land? How long, Duncan?” She could tell by the shadow that had come over his face that her words had somehow struck a chord deep within him. “And how long was it before your people sickened of being treated like animals and rose up against the English and demanded their rights?” She pressed her point. “And how many Scottish lives were lost over the centuries in their fight to keep their identity?”

  Her words had cut him to the bone. He who had buried generation after generation of young martyrs to the cause of Scotland. He who’d witnessed the trail of the dying, the mutilated, the violated left in the English wake. Even now, he could almost hear their voices begging him to help them. “Too many,” he said quietly, haunted.

  She did not relent. “Then think about this: Was Scotland’s William Wallace really that different than Yasser Arafat?”

  “It’s not that simple anymore.”

  “Isn’t it? One man’s terrorist is another man’s hero. Whether they fight for the freedom to raise sheep in the Highlands or the Golan Heights.” She reached across the table to grab him by the arm, almost blinding him with her intensity. “Hasn’t there ever been anything in your life so precious you were willing to fight for it?”

  How could she know? How could she understand? She dredged the word up from his soul. “Yes.”

  Maral released his arm and her urgent energy seemed to dissipate into the empty restaurant. “Good,” she said, settling back into her chair, relaxed. “So Duncan MacLeod is a man of great passion and principles. I like that.” She picked up her fork and resumed eating, a look of satisfaction clear on her face.

  “So, Professor, does that mean I pass?” He was a man of many secrets who’d been interrogated by some of the best inquisitors of their generations, but had never talked, never broken. Yet this woman had found all his buttons and had played them like music. With a few deft cuts, she had laid bare his soul. She continued to amaze him. “Or do I have to try for extra credit?”

  “Maybe just a little homework.” That wicked look was back.

  MacLeod looked at her and felt something strong stir within him. The promise. The possibilities. “I’ll do whatever it takes, Professor.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  The chirping sound of a ringing cellular phone filled the restaurant. Assad, seated at the next table pretending not to eavesdrop, pulled the phone out of his jacket and flipped it open. “Assad,” he announced, then listened intently. “Halan”—immediately—he responded. Standing up, he handed the phone to Maral and moved quickly toward the kitchen. As he left he barked “Arabaya!” to his partner, who immediately left to fetch the car.

  “Amina,” Maral said into the phone. MacLeod couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but he could follow the language of her body, the emotion in her face as it changed from interest to concern, briefly to fear, and then finally to sorrow. “Iwa,” she said heavily into the phone, but agreeing to what, MacLeod didn’t know. When she toggled off the phone, she looked ten years older.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “We have to go back.” She pushed back from the table and stood, reaching for her shawl. It was clear she didn’t intend to tell him anything more. MacLeod took her by the hand and held it.

  “Maral, tell me what’s happened. Let me help.”

  “You want to help? Build me a world where husbands and fathers and sons aren’t gunned down in the street because of the way they choose to worship God.” Her words were brittle as she tried to pull away from him. He wouldn’t let her go, giving her a calm, steady look that plainly let her know he would patiently wait until she was ready to share her pain with him. She tried halfheartedly to pull away again, then acquiesced with a sigh. “The shooter yesterday. His body’s gone-someone’s stolen it.”

  Missing bodies always caught MacLeod’s attention. “You’re sure no one has it?”

  “The Hebron police thought the military had it. The military thought the civilian coroner’s office had it. You know how it goes. And by the time they realized it was gone, someone had called today claiming responsibility for the attack. An organization we’ve never heard of before, called Oneg Shabbat.”

  “Sabbath surprise?” MacLeod translated the Hebrew, releasing Maral’s hand, trying to place why he knew the name.

  Assad, returning from the kitchen, overheard him. “You know them?” he asked, reaching for his gun.

  “No,” MacLeod said, exasperated, “and put that thing away before you hurt yourself. Oneg Shabbat is a party for children after worship.” He stopped a moment, thinking. “But it was also the name of a group of scholars in Poland who documented the Holocaust and kept the records hidden from the Germans.”

  “So you have heard of them,” Assad pressed.

  MacLeod shook his head. “They died fifty years ago. And they were scholars, not fighters. It’s got to be some other group using the same name.”

  “Put away the gun, Assad,” Maral said, and he co
mplied. MacLeod retrieved the shawl and draped it over Maral’s shoulders. She pulled it eagerly around her, as if a shield, but drew no warmth from it. “Whoever they are,” she said, “this changes everything. It wasn’t just some lone fanatic listening to voices in his head. This is different. This is organized, deliberate. We don’t know anything about them—they could be anywhere, planning anything.” A shiver ran through her, and instinctively she pulled the ancient shawl, the emblem of her family and her people, more tightly to her. “Forty-three men praying is only a start for them, Duncan—my God, just think what could be next.”

  Despite a murdereous look from Assad, MacLeod put an arm around her trembling shoulders and drew her to him in a comforting embrace, willing the heat and strength of his body into hers. They’d known each other such a brief time, but there was something about her—her beauty, her inner strength, her vulnerability, maybe all of the above and more—that called forth the Protector in him. “We should go back now,” he whispered. “You’ll be safe there.”

  “It’s not my safety, Duncan. It’s my people.” At Assad’s signal to depart, she pulled away from the embrace, but allowed MacLeod’s arm to stay protectively across her shoulders as he escorted her to the door. “It’s the children on their way to school, women in the marketplaces. I’m not afraid for me, I’m afraid for them. And for the future. We’re so close to peace, Duncan, so close. Something like this could ruin everything.”

  As he helped her into the car, MacLeod looked at her and a hint of sadness touched his heart. A beautiful but poignant mix of East and West, of the runways of Paris and the caravans of the Arabian desert. The legendary Palestine of her past and the very real Israel of her present. Maral Amina might claim she was no martyr, but he’d seen devotion like hers end in tragedy too many times. It took a very special kind of person to put the onus of three thousand years of history ahead of her own life.

  As he settled next to her and Assad closed the door behind him, he pulled the gift box from his pocket. He’d hoped to give it to her at a more auspicious time, but now it appeared that such a time might never exist for them. “I’d like you to have this.” He did his best to make the tattered paper more presentable.

  Maral had to laugh at his earnest attempt at the impossible. “Don’t tell me—you have a puppy?” she said, looking at the sorry wrapping. Her face brightened with anticipation as he handed it to her and although she reached for the box with studied casualness, he thought he could see peeking out the excited little girl held barely in check. He suspected Maral was a woman who could use more unexpected gifts in her life.

  “A puppy named Farid. I don’t think he’s housebroken yet, either.” As they touched and he transferred the gift to her, the last traces of paper fluttered away, leaving Maral with a plain white box the size of her hand. “You can’t say he’s not thorough, though,” MacLeod said wryly.

  Maral quickly pulled the top from the box and withdrew her prizes—two gazelles, intricately hand-wrought of iron, their elongated faces wise but sad. Their graceful legs had been carefully formed into combs for a lady’s hair. With a quick intake of breath, she was beaming like a ten-year-old with a new bike. “Duncan”—she held them out in front of her to admire them—”they’re breathtaking.”

  “Then they’re in good company.” With Assad and his trusty sidekick in such close proximity, MacLeod resisted the temptation to reach up and remove the wooden combs binding her luscious hair. Some other time. “There once was a small tribe in a region of the grasslands of East Africa where metals are very, very scarce,” he said in his best storytelling voice. “The people of the tribe believed that Father Iron was the most sacred of all the metals, and those in the tribe who could work with iron were considered blessed.” In the back of his mind, he could hear the singsong voice of the ancient griot who once told him the tale. He hoped he was doing her memory honor in his retelling. “Now, to these people, the greatest of the animals that roamed the grasslands was not Lion, with his cruel and vicious hunger.” The griot had growled at that point, but MacLeod wasn’t sure that would be appropriate in his current setting. Assad might take it personally. “It wasn’t Elephant, all-mighty and powerful. The greatest of the animals was Gazelle.”

  “The gazelle,” she repeated and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t buying this for a minute but would happily play along.

  “Are you always this tough an audience? This one always wows ’em at the preschool.” He took one of the gazelle combs from her hand and continued as if uninterrupted. “Gazelle, Now Gazelle didn’t have the power of the lion or the strength of the elephant. But Gazelle had a special magic all her own. She could fly with the winds. She could run until she caught the horizon. Gazelle had heart. She had courage. She had grace and passion. And with this special magic, she could escape Lion’s cruel hunger and she could direct Elephant’s all-mighty strength.” He cocked his head toward Maral. “You getting all of this?”

  “The greatest of all the animals,” she said, stroking the slender coil of horn that rose above the dark wise eyes.

  “Now, metals being scarce and all, this was a tribe that wouldn’t just cast any warthog into sacred iron—that they reserved for Gazelle. Because, so they said, when a truly skilled craftsman created Gazelle in Father Iron, he could imbue the piece with her special magic, and those same qualities that made Gazelle the greatest of all the animals would bless the bearer.” He pressed the second comb back into Maral’s hands. “Fly with the winds, Maral. Run until you catch the horizon.”

  She stared at him, openmouthed, and the streetlight glinted from a tear in the corner of her eye. She started to speak, then stopped, at a loss for words, then as she tried to speak again, Assad interrupted.

  “We are here,” he announced, and the car stopped abruptly in front of the hotel once again. Immediately the car door was opened and MacLeod was pulled out by security guards intent on Maral’s safety.

  As she exited the car, Farid moved quickly to spirit her away into the fortress of the grand hotel, but Maral stopped him with a hand. She turned back to MacLeod. She didn’t dare touch him, couldn’t in front of this crowd of men so concerned for her protection, but he could see it smolder in her eyes, feel it flow between the two of them like a thing alive. The possibilities. The need.

  MacLeod moved toward her and, despite a fierce look of warning from Farid, kissed her chastely on one cheek. “So how much of that was bullshit?” she whispered to him.

  “Does it matter?” was his reply, as she was pulled away from him.

  “Ana muser,” Farid said harshly. I insist.

  MacLeod called after her. “You need anything, anything at all, you call me.”

  I promise—she mouthed the words as Farid and his men swept her into the great revolving doors and away from MacLeod’s sight.

  Chapter Five

  Israel: 14 Nisan, The Present

  The sun shone bright over the Dead Sea, its rays reflecting off the shimmering blue surface. On the road that skirted along the edge of the sea, Avram Mordecai reached into the glove box for his sunglasses. With one hand he flipped them open and put them on, relieved to be able to see the road again.

  There wasn’t much traffic on the narrow road that wove its way through the craggy desert surrounding the sea of salt. It wasn’t yet high season for the seaside resorts, despite the unseasonably warm spring, so the hordes of tourists who flocked to the area to encase themselves in mud baths or just float in the briny waters had not yet begun to clog up the roads. He could never see the attraction, himself.

  He was only a couple of miles out of the oasis town of Ein Gedi, the last speck of green for miles in this wilderness, when he spotted it, up ahead in the distance—Masada. Its sheer rock facings towered more than a quarter mile above the sea far below and then stopped abruptly to form a vast plateau, as if God had begun to make a mountain, and then been called away halfway through. Avram was still some miles away, but the promontory on which King Herod had
built his fortress dominated the landscape.

  Avram glanced at the dashboard clock. It had taken him less than two hours to make the drive from Jerusalem. The first time he had made the journey, it had taken over a week. He and his father had nearly died in the wilderness, and their first glimpse—like now, shimmering through the heat in the distance—of the impenetrable stronghold high atop the mesa had seemed like a beacon of hope sent by God.

  The rock loomed ever larger as Avram sped toward it. A trick of the light, a small cloud shadowing the sun—he was certain he saw, just for a moment, the magnificence of Herod’s palace perched precariously on the steep north face, resplendent in white and gold. But he knew it was illusion, nothing more. He’d been with the party that unearthed the secrets of Masada in the years after the liberation of Israel, slung a trowel and hauled rock with the other students and soldiers and housewives eager to find the truth. Avram had seen for himself that nothing remained now but patterns of rocks and the sands of time.

  He pulled his car into the parking lot by the youth hostel at the foot of Masada and got out. In a pair of faded jeans, hiking boots, and a T-shirt proclaiming a popular Tel Aviv coffeehouse, he could easily pass as one of the many Israeli teenagers who made the pilgrimage to Masada each day, looking for their cultural heritage, looking for their own identity. And in many ways, he was.

  A cable car whisked tourists from the base to the summit in a matter of minutes. Avram rolled his eyes disdainfully at the idea of such laziness and walked on. To truly know Masada, one should suffer, at least a bit. There were two other paths up the face of the rock for those who preferred to climb under their own power. Most chose the huge earthen ramp that sloped from the foot to the top, an easy ten-minute walk. Avram refused. The enormous ramp was all that remained of the giant siege engine the Romans had constructed to take Masada. He’d watched it built, day by day, bit by bit, on the blood and death of ten thousand Jewish slaves forced to toil in the desert heat. Each day it had crept closer to the summit, each day closer to the last remaining bastion of Jewish freedom. He’d sooner die than justify its existence now.