Highlander - Donna Lettow [111]
He raced down the corridor of offices toward the ballroom. As he neared the side door he and Avram had exited, the hall-way began to fill with frenzied people. Farid’s signal to evacuate the dignitaries had started a panic among the press.
“Out of my way!” MacLeod screamed, pushing upstream, Railing against the current to get back to the ballroom. No time for niceties, he pulled and hit and fought his way through the door and into the room.
The Israeli and Palestinian leaders were gone, taken out immediately. The last of the delegates were fighting for the door behind the dais. He didn’t see Maral. In the hall itself, the media were climbing over their equipment and each other in their hurry to escape, except for two cowboy journalists in the midst of the chaos determined to report live from the scene.
Farid and his men were combing the room for the device side by side with the Israeli security, overturning chairs, scouring the dais, examining equipment cases, but still nothing. MacLeod looked wildly around the room. If he were Avram, where would he put it? Where would he plant a bomb?
If he were Avram … “… they won’t even know which side did the final deed.” Suddenly, spotting the crossed Israeli and Palestinian flags, he knew.
“Farid!” MacLeod screamed into the communicator. “The pen stand! It’s in the pen stand!” Across the room, he saw Farid dive for the podium. When Farid grabbed the pen stand, MacLeod could tell from his face he’d guessed correctly—the weight was all wrong.
Farid clawed desperately at the device, trying to open it, but no success. “Farid!” MacLeod shouted into the security chief’s earpiece. Across the room, the two men’s eyes locked. “Throw it.” MacLeod gestured with his arms. “I’ll get it out of here.” Farid looked around, looking for some other option, finding none. “THROW IT!” MacLeod screamed into Farid’s headset.
MacLeod waved everyone away from him as Farid drew back his arm to throw the device, and the press didn’t need to be told twice to scatter. As the small wooden box spiraled through the air, Farid muttered a quick prayer to Allah and braced for detonation on impact.
MacLeod fielded the box into his midsection to cushion the hit, but even he was surprised it didn’t go off as he caught it. He headed for the ballroom door.
MacLeod charged into the hallway yelling “It’s a bomb, out of my way!” To his dismay, the corridor was filled in either direction with the panicking press. They started to scream and run at his approach. He didn’t have time to think, to plan which way to go. He just had to get out. He ran straight across the hall to one of the offices. With a powerful kick, he broke open the door.
A window, Thank God.
Leading with his shoulder, MacLeod crashed and rolled through the plate-glass window as if it were paper. Somewhere far behind him he thought he could hear Maral scream.
“DUNCAN!!”
Once outside, he threw the bomb away from him into the night for all he was worth. Instantly, his world exploded.
He was pain. A ball of pain. A throbbing mass of pain. Pain was his only reality. Pain was his awareness. He had no senses—no sight, no sound, no sensation—but he knew the pain. It moved in him and through him like a thing alive.
Hearing returned first. Off in the distance, almost as if in another world, he could hear shouting and screaming, the insistent wail of a siren. Somewhere a woman cried … a woman … and then he remembered. He remembered Maral, the bomb, Avram, he remembered Immortality, he remembered the Highlands of Scotland so many, many years ago. He was no longer pain. He was once again Duncan MacLeod. He gasped for air, and it seared down his throat like molten lava.
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