Highlander - Donna Lettow [51]
He’d called Paris home for a couple of decades, six hundred years or so ago. He figured he’d called just about everywhere home at one time or another. Wherever his people had been dispersed, it seemed he’d been there at least once in his travels. A man wandering in search of his identity could cover a lot of territory in two thousand years. In Paris, he’d lived on a piece of swampland known as the Marais. He’d opened a small shop—Avram ben Mordecai, Scribe—and made a pleasant life for himself there in the Jewish Quarter. But only Jerusalem had ever truly been his home, and it wasn’t long before the urge to move on had taken him on the road again.
With a few jolts and bumps, the E1 A1 jet touched down at Orly and Avram jockeyed to be among the first off as it taxied to the jetway. He’d checked no baggage, only his government-issue roll-aboard and worn leather rucksack as carry-on, and he moved briskly from the gate toward Immigration and Customs, looking like a young lawyer, or perhaps an accountant, in his conservative suit. The lines at the Immigration kiosks were long, all the morning flights from overseas seemed to arrive at once, but Avram bypassed them all and went instead to a small desk at the side of the throng. He pulled a diplomatic passport from his satchel, clearly marked with the seal of Israel, and flashed it at the Immigration agent, who checked it cursorily to make sure the photo matched the youthful man presenting it and waved him through.
Within minutes, he was out in the bright sunlight of Paris, squinting at the cars in the pickup lanes. He reached into his satchel, pulled out his sunglasses. Better. A dark sedan pulled up at the curb alongside him, and the window slid smoothly down. “Mordecai?” one of the two men inside asked. Avram nodded and hopped in the back.
“Welcome to Paris, Mordecai,” the driver said. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“Something came up,” Avram said, as they pulled away from the curb and out into airport traffic.
“Dr. Amina! Dr. Amina! What do you think are the chances the Hamas threat will disrupt the negotiations?” The lights from the video cameras blinded her as she tried to make her way down the stairs to the driveway.
“Doctor! Do you think there’s any hope left for East Jerusalem?” An overzealous hand pushed forward a microphone that nearly hit her in the face before it was deflected by Assad.
“Do you fear for your personal safety, Dr. Amina?” Assad and another security man hardly managed to get Maral through the gauntlet of reporters and sound-bite specialists lying in wait outside the Hôtel Lutéstia and safely into one of the waiting cars. The other delegates fared no better.
“ ‘Do I fear for my personal safely,’ “ Maral mocked once safely behind tinted glass with MacLeod. “Yes, I do—from them, the damn vultures. As if this isn’t hard enough.”
“It’s okay,” MacLeod consoled her. “It’s over for now.”
She shook her head. “It’s never over—there’ll be just as many waiting on the other end.”
Normally the trip from the hotel to the anonymous French government building belonging to the Ministry of Education that had been pressed into service for the negotiations would take ten minutes, even in the traffic-logged streets of Paris. For a caravan of six limousines and their police escort, the trip took more like half an hour, creeping through the congested thoroughfares. Every moment, Moral was on edge, and the security men alert for the slightest sound or motion out of the ordinary.
When they finally pulled up to the Ministry building, MacLeod could see that Moral had been right. Another throng of reporters, TV journalists, and the morbidly curious waited outside. But on this end, thanks to an Israeli security detail with no qualms about showing automatic weapons in public, the mobs were neatly contained behind strict lines of demarcation.
Moral explained with