Highlander - Donna Lettow [114]
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.”
Chapter Twenty-two
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