Author: Paula Stiles Title: Armed Intervention Feedback address: thesnowleopardAhotmail.com Rating: R Keywords/Comments: First story in a series Character listing: DM, J, M, Amy Thomas, OMCs Short teaser/summary: Worried about Methos' erratic behaviour, Joe investigates the Old Man's whereabouts during the Ahriman crisis--and finds out far more than he feared. Disclaimer: Panzer/Davis own Methos, Joe, MacLeod and the Highlander universe. I don't own Don Henley's 'I Will Not Lie Down', The Beatles 'I Am the Walrus', The Boxtops' 'The Letter' or John Denver's 'Leaving on a Jetplane', either. Atticus and Petronius are mine, so I get to do whatever I like with them. Spartacus and Crixus are historical figures (as well as escaped slaves), and therefore belong to nobody. This is just an experiment. I'm having a little fun and am not getting paid for it. Some dialogue from Highlander episodes "Indiscretions", "One Minute to Midnight", "The Messenger", and "To Be" is used. Incidentally, I'm using only the series and the 'Director's Cut' of 'Endgame' as canon, and am dating 'Endgame' to the winter of 2001/2. Everything else is merrily ignored. Archive: Seventh Dimension. All others, ask, and ye shall probably receive permission. Note: This is the first story in a series. Many thanks to Judith Hill for whacking out the inconsistencies and typo bunnies from this little tale, and for many discussions about Methos, Roman history, sword types and other fun topics. Thanks also to Rachel Trench for providing a cheering section and warning me about MacLeod's car. These, and my other stories, can be found at: http:www.geocities.com/RainForest/Andes/3071/arch.html ARMED INTERVENTION Woke up with a heavy head and I thought about leaving town. I could have died if I wanted to, slipped over the edge and drowned. But, oh no, baby. I won't give up that easy, no. Too many timetracks in the sands of time. Too many love affairs that stop on a dime. Ohhh, baby. Think it's time to make some changes 'round here. Yeah, gonna tear it up Gonna trash it up. Gonna round it up. Gonna shake it up. Oh, no, baby. I will not lie down. Paris, May 19, 1997 Richie comes to me first. The kid walks up to me where I kneel in my garden, planting flowers in the dirt. He circles around me, sword in hand, head cradled like a fencing mask under his left arm. "I know you, Old Timer," the head whispers. In Richie's right hand, the sword glows with the fires of Hell--the way I saw it glow after MacLeod killed him tonight. Joe limps up behind Richie, grinning like a skull. "I know you, you crafty son of a bitch," he says. I gape back at him. I'd think that he, at least, would understand. I didn't know. How could I? I honestly thought that MacLeod had lost his mind. Yet...swords just don't glow like that. And I don't know what that means. I've never seen it before. Ecclesiastes was wrong. There is always something new under the sun--especially if it is evil. Behind Joe, Don and Christine Salzer walk down the steps into the garden hand in hand. Christine glares at me, while Don looks on blandly. "We know you, you treacherous bastard." Christine speaks for them both. Don can no longer speak, after all, since he died without a tongue. His silence still hurts. Christine never did like me. She was always jealous of Don and me, but Don.... I would have saved him, if I could, but again, I didn't know. I didn't know Kalas was after me, didn't know that he would go after Don to get me. I wanted to take that bastard's head for Don, but I was too weak in the end. Too old. Charlotte pads across the soft grass to me and lays a hand upon my head. "I know you, Benjamin," she says gently. She pulls her robe closer about her broken body. Blood trickles down through her lovely, dark hair and drops onto my hand. A bearded man in a black, ankle-length robe with a red cross on the chest stumbles into the garden on blackened feet. The smell of charred flesh hangs about him like a swarm of flies. He holds out his hand to me. Cradled in it are bones from his own feet. Oh, no. No. It was so long ago. Not this, too. "Je te connaiz, Iudas," he hisses. Damn you, Girard. I wasn't the one who betrayed you. It wasn't me! Don't you remember? I suffered, too! Alexa, love, where are you? Why won't you come? The last figure to enter the crowded garden stands just over five feet tall, but he carries himself like a warrior. Though he's dressed in a slave's blue tunic, he wears a centurion's armour. His face has mummified after a month hanging on a cross in Campania. The sight of him makes me want to weep. I still remember climbing that cross, trying to drag him back to the ground, so I could give him a decent burial. I failed at that, too. He levels his gladius at me. It glows red. "Te noui, gladiatore," he rasps. "Pugnaui pro te et me interfecis. Te noui, Spartace. Te noui!" Behind him, six thousand crosses stretch into the shimmering, infinite distance, down the long, long Appian Way. A rich man's revenge against a slave who dared to humiliate Rome. I can smell them, baking in the heat for months after their last battle. Six thousand men. *My* men, whom I killed. I run down the Via Appia, screaming, but there is no sound. Crows flock on the crosses, pecking at the faces of my men. I cannot hear them. No sound. Just the rotted smell of dead men and the bright sun burning down on me. Let it all burn.... When I wake up on Joe's couch, I cannot remember how I got there, or that I've agreed to arrange for Richie's funeral in the morning. I only know that I have to leave. I gather up my boots, pack my bag, and flee. It doesn't matter that I'm leaving my best friend behind, alone. It doesn't matter what Joe will think when he wakes in the morning to find me gone. What matters is that I get away. I run and run and run until I drop. I get up and run some more. It is over a year before I stop long enough to think and plan--let alone feel. By then, it is too late. ********* From: "ROG" <5koldfartAhotmail.com> To: "J. Dawson" Subject: I'm Baaaaaack Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 16:12:06 0000 Hullo Joe, You really should consider changing your handle. What would poor MacLeod think? Oh, wait, he's still living in the age of blunderbusses and wax-sealed letters, isn't he? No danger there. Hope Amy's ok (is she speaking to you, now?). I sold that white elephant I was living in last week and decided to go back to basics (backpacking). I've been missing the good old days at Shakespeare & Company; think I'll try to get another job there. I'll be in town on Wednesday or Thursday night. Thought I'd drop by, catch up with you. I don't want you to get *too* complacent about my bar tab. Has it hit the quintuple digits, yet? Be seeing you, M ********* Paris, September 4, 2002 It was a quiet night at Le Blues Bar. Joe's daughter Amy Thomas had shown up, so he decided to catch up on the old times they'd never had. She'd spent the past year in Singapore doing research, after the Immortal she'd been Watching disappeared in the World Trade Center disaster in New York the previous Fall. She stayed in touch, but not with much regularity. Joe was making better progress with her than he'd expected when a tall, red-headed man in his late 40's wandered in through the door. He came up to where Joe and Amy were chatting at the bar. "Joe Dawson?" he asked, with a professionally amiable smile. As he reached out to shake hands, Joe saw his Watcher tattoo. "Uh, yeah," he replied, shaking the man's hand. "Can I help you?" He glanced over at Amy, who looked confused. "Chris Mancuso," the man said cheerily. "I'm with the office over in Seacouver, now." "You're a long way away from home, Chris," Joe said. "What can we do for you here in Paris? Can I get you a drink?" "Thanks, a Miller beer, if you don't mind." Mancuso sat down. "I'm afraid I'm here on business, Joe." "Oh?" Joe watched Mancuso uneasily. This sounded like Immortal trouble, but who could it be? Mac was in America, but Joe was pretty sure that he was over in New York. Mac's present official Watcher made little effort to keep Joe in the loop. Professional jealousy, Joe supposed. Fairhead was an ambitious little weasel, and didn't like Joe. Joe probably still knew more about MacLeod's movements (by hearing about them directly from the source) than Fairhead did. Methos had last emailed him five days ago. The Old Man had been local all summer and was still Watcher free (although he liked to joke that he did a pretty good job of Watching himself). He and Joe had come to an 'understanding', a few years back, but Joe was never quite sure what that understanding meant. Apparently, it didn't involve Methos hanging around Paris, or keeping in touch with any kind of regularity. Even though the Old Man came by the Bar several times per week, at the moment, Joe had no idea how long this would last. Amanda...Joe didn't have a clue about her. Wherever she was, he was pretty sure that it wasn't Seacouver. The three Watchers settled down at the bar together for a quiet drink before Mancuso got down to the subject of his visit. "I'm not here about an Immortal," he explained. "I'm here on internal business--one of our own." The words chilled Joe. God, let it not be another James Horton. "A rogue Watcher?" he asked. "Hunting Immortals?" Mancuso shook his head. "No, nothing like that. I wouldn't call him a 'rogue', exactly. You made a request two months ago, to the Cold Cases section of the Watchers about the Ahriman case five years ago. I work for them." Joe shivered. "Oh. That." Methos had been acting odder than usual since May, right around the time that Ahriman had tricked MacLeod into killing Richie, back in '97. In fact, he'd been acting just as he had when he'd first returned after that horrible year lost to Ahriman. At the time, when Joe demanded to know where Methos had been, the Old Man replied evasively, "Here and there. There, mostly." Joe finally decided that he had waited long enough to find out where "here and there" had been, and decided to ferret out the truth on his own. He put the request in to the Cold Cases section about 'Adam Pierson' in June, the day after Methos had shown up in the bar, having disappeared for a week with no explanation. It wasn't the first time Methos had skipped town, but it was the first time he'd done it after making plans with Joe. Cold Cases was no help. After a month, Joe gave up on them. When they never bothered to email him back he moved on to other, hopefully more productive, inquiries. "A lot of fallout from that one," Mancuso continued. "Four Watchers and one Immortal dead. Your assignment, Duncan MacLeod, going nuts and killing his student, then disappearing off to some monastery for over a year. And there was that missing/AWOL Watcher who used to hang out with MacLeod so much. You asked us to trace his movements." Amy looked puzzled. "Missing Watcher?" she asked. "I used to work with him," Joe explained to Amy. "The guy who was assigned to the Methos myth." Oh, Christ, Methos. *Now* what? "Adam Pierson," Joe clarified, as neutrally as he could manage, considering how pissed off he was at the Old Man right now. Bad enough that Methos was the eldest known Immortal, that his five thousand years of life so often made him as difficult to fathom as the Sphinx. Did everything about him have to be like navigating a mine field? What bad karma had caused Joe to be the one to find out that Methos had infiltrated the Watchers as mild-mannered grad student Adam Pierson in the first place? "That flake?" Amy said incredulously. "What did he do now?" "You know about him?" Joe was astonished. "Of course! Adam Pierson is one of those bad examples that they show you in the Academy of how *not* to be a Watcher. Not as bad as Horton, of course, but definitely not a positive role model. I understand they revised the psychological profile testing after he disappeared into thin air." *Little girl, you have no idea.* "He's not that bad," Joe hedged. "Adam's backed me up in some bad situations. He's a little strange, I'll admit, but he's a good guy." "Uh huh." Amy sipped her watermelon Bacardi Breezer, looking unimpressed. "Right. Aside from designing that CD-ROM database that almost got the entire Watcher organisation exposed to the world, and going off on walkabout all the time, he's Mr. Dependable. Did you know that he went to live in some concrete shack in *Africa* for seven months back in 1991? I understand he came back with a trucker's tan and some silly story about how he'd heard that Methos was down there. Because Don Salzer covered for him, nobody could go after him over it. Yes, he sounds like just the kind of person *I'd* want in my corner during a crisis." Joe made a face. He remembered that little stunt very well--it had been he, not Salzer, who had covered for Methos on that one. He decided not to mention that fact to either Amy or Mancuso. Covering for Methos was a habit he'd acquired while he still thought the Old Man was Adam Pierson. He'd always thought of Adam as a big, goofy kid who absentmindedly violated procedure almost every day. Don had been just like that when he'd been at the Academy. There were still stories floating around about his sillier missteps. When MacLeod told him that Pierson was really Methos, Joe had laughed out loud. It made perfect sense. Methos must have chosen his Watcher mentor very carefully, and then temporarily modeled his own eccentricities on Don's. Joe even noticed a few of his own quirks in the Old Man. Whatever you might call Methos (and right now, Joe had a few choice words prepared for their next encounter), he was a fast learner. To Joe's utter astonishment, Mancuso came to Me-- Pierson's defense. "Don't be too hard on the guy, Miss," he said. "I suspect that he was under a lot more pressure than his superiors realised when he disappeared. That incident where Director Shapiro turned Hunter and put Mr. Dawson here on trial really seemed to shake him up." Both Joe and Amy winced. That scrape had been a lot closer than Joe would have liked. He was glad to know that it made Amy uncomfortable, too. He hadn't realised that she knew about him, at the time, but she had already been following his career. She was one of the few people still in the organisation who saw him as a good Watcher. He was grateful for that. But he'd never tell her that if Adam Pierson hadn't treated him after he'd been shot, he would have died. That was another fact about his friendship with the Old Man that he didn't feel comfortable sharing with her. He didn't want her putting two and two together and coming up with a whole number. "A lot of people were shaken up by that," Amy insisted, unimpressed. "They didn't turn renegade and just quit." Joe remembered Methos' words of self-loathing and bewilderment after giving up Galati to Shapiro to save MacLeod from Watcher Hunters. Galati was MacLeod's friend, but he'd also murdered Shapiro's son. After Shapiro killed Galati in front of MacLeod, Mac had turned his back on both Joe and Methos. Joe tried to get Methos to go after Mac, but the Old Man had been too sick at heart to do it. "What about you, Joe?" Methos had snarled. "Who do you go after? I am five thousand years old. I don't know who I am anymore. I just helped set up one of my own!" "I did not know they were going to kill him," Joe insisted, but his defense had sounded weak, even in his own ears. "You keep telling yourself that, Joe," Methos had retorted bitterly. "Maybe you'll start to believe it." And then he had walked away, too, not just from Joe and MacLeod, but from the whole Watcher organisation. With Joe and Mac yanking his loyalties in opposite directions, freezing him out when he vacillated, it was no surprise when he burned off his own Watcher tattoo and dropped out of sight. It had only seemed surprising at the time. "He had his reasons," Joe said. *I just can't tell you what they were,* he thought morosely. "So did a lot of people," Amy insisted. "But they didn't just quit." "Maybe," Mancuso acknowledged. "But they hadn't lost their mentor to an Immortal headhunter the year before, and they hadn't caught Hell for something that really wasn't their fault." Joe was impressed by Mancuso's demonstration of compassion. Was the cold attitude in the Watcher hierarchy towards Methos finally thawing or was this some sort of set-up? It was a funny sort of irony that a group of people who had spent so much time looking for the all-wise Methos now ostracised him and refused to believe anything that he said. "*Everybody* is on the database now," Mancuso was saying. "It's no real secret that they took Pierson on board to design the model we have now, and used his files and organisational structure even after he left. Basically, he's the author of the Watcher database, but he'll never get the credit. Not in a million years. If that jerk in charge of the European division during the early '90s hadn't been such a dinosaur, maybe Pierson and Salzer wouldn't have needed to go sneaking around behind his back in the first place. If Shapiro could get away with early retirement for murdering an Immortal right in Watcher Headquarters, then surely we can cut Pierson a little slack, you know? As far as I can tell, he was only a little eccentric before. It was only after Shapiro went bad that Pierson started acting really erratic. Considering what I just dug up, maybe somebody should have talked to him before he disappeared." He picked a portfolio out of his briefcase and opened it, pulling out a thin file. "I think you should look at this, Dawson." He handed Joe the file. Joe opened it to see a police photo of Methos, looking more than a little battered. The Old Man was listed as a John Doe. In the picture, Methos' eyes were glassy, as if he were drunk. Stupid of him to let his picture be taken. Or to let himself be arrested. Completely uncharacteristic. The piece of paper underneath, attached to the photo by a paperclip, was even more disconcerting. It was a police commitment order for a 'John Doe', obviously the man in the photo, to Seacouver County General for psychiatric evaluation. "What the Hell?" Joe said softly, half to himself. Before he realised it, Amy had tugged the folder out of his hand. He grabbed it back, but not before she'd spotted the photo. Her face went still. "He escaped after four months," Mancuso explained. "Just walked away from a supervised trip to the movies and disappeared off the map, again." Joe read onward. "It says here that he spent a lot of the first week 'under restraint'." "Probably bouncing around a rubber room tranked to his eyeballs. He apparently calmed down enough to get himself off the grounds with a chaperoned group ten weeks later. He was smart; he didn't take off on the first trip. He waited until after the third outing, when they'd relaxed their guard with him, to give them the slip. They're not very happy with him, of course." That sounded just like Methos. What had he been doing in a mental hospital for four months? Joe read the escape date again, and shivered. Methos escaped only a week before he'd popped back into Joe's life, acting as though nothing had happened, and helped him save Amy. The way he might just pop into Joe's bar any minute, now. "So, what does this have to do with me?" Joe asked. He needed to get this man out of the bar before Methos strolled in. He needed to talk to Methos--he glanced down at the report again and swallowed. He *really* needed to talk to Methos. Mancuso rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking weary. "Did you look at the reason for his arrest?" "Ummm," Joe flipped through the folder until he found the police report. He read it twice over before saying, very quietly, "Jesus Christ." "No kidding," Mancuso said, smiling without humour. "I would call lying down on a set of train tracks with your neck on the rail to be a pretty serious suicide attempt, even if Pierson were an Immortal, wouldn't you? The cops who pulled him off the line certainly thought so. Looks as though Adam Pierson has taken his research a bit more to heart than anybody suspected. Either that, or the rumours about him being Methos are true." "You don't really think he's Methos, do you?" Joe asked, praying that the answer was 'No'. Amy rolled her eyes, but thankfully did not laugh out loud. Mancuso chuckled. "Joe, I'll admit to still looking for Santa's reindeer on Christmas Eve at the ripe old age of 45. I'll even admit to believing in Atlantis. But Methos the Five Thousand Year Old Immortal? That's a bit far-fetched, even for me." "You don't think he's an Immortal at all. Or even a pre-Immortal." "Well, he could be," Mancuso shrugged. "But I doubt it. Nobody ever did prove anything, one way or the other. Since he seems to have taken his Watcher Chronicles with him, they've never been able to figure out just what kind of damage he did to the Methos project. Either way, he's unbalanced. He certainly isn't who he seems to think he is. That puts him and the rest of us in danger. Remember that false Methos who surfaced a few years ago? God, did that man cause trouble before he got himself killed. Think how much uglier it could get for an ex-Watcher pulling the same stunt." "How did you match the photos?" Joe asked. "I thought that Pierson had destroyed all of his files before he left." "Oh, that turned out to be easy enough," Mancuso said. "I found a photo of him and Don Salzer at some dinner in Salzer's old chronicles. After that, I used it to match up with John Does in the areas where Pierson had been seen. Since Pierson was spotted hanging out with Duncan MacLeod in Seacouver a few years back, that was one of the first places that I tried. I hit paydirt." "I see." Methos wasn't going to be happy to hear that he'd left a photo of himself in the Watcher Chronicles. "What do you want me to do?" Joe asked. "That's what I was going to ask you," Mancuso replied. "I heard he got mixed up in that bad blood between the MacLeods and Jacob Kell earlier this year. Rumour has it that he's back in town finishing his PhD degree. I heard he used to hang out here pretty regularly. I thought we might be able to catch up with him, finally. We take care of our own. We have to. You know him better than I do. What do you think?" Inwardly, Joe groaned. ********* "When were you planning on telling me that your best friend is the oldest Immortal in the world?" Amy said, after Mancuso had left the bar. "Amy, it's not what you think--" Joe began. "Don't lie to me, Joe," Amy snapped. She never had quite gotten into the habit of calling him 'Dad'. "That's Ben Adams in the picture, but it's Adam Pierson, too. Most people in the Watchers who believe that Adam Pierson is Immortal believe that Kalas killed him for the first time--and we both know that Ben Adams is over two hundred years old. How does that work?" "Amy," Joe sighed. "It doesn't really matter. You wrote him up as Ben Adams and he's no longer with the Watchers. He won't betray us. He just wants to be left alone." "I'd like to know the real identity of the man who saved my life four years ago, Joe," Amy said. "I think that I'm entitled to know that, especially since I wrote up Walker's killer as an unknown Immortal." Joe looked into his beer. "I see." "He's Methos, isn't he?" Joe glanced up at her warily. "What makes you say that?" Amy leaned forward and smiled sardonically. "Joe, I sneaked back with you to see that fight, remember? Walker never really had a chance." Her face twisted with hatred for the man who had kidnapped and threatened her. "Not that the bastard deserved one. Of course, *Walker* didn't realise how outmatched he was until it was too late. You once said that Adams had walked away from a fight with Walker, over the death of a woman. Why wouldn't Walker think that? But it was obvious after Adams electrocuted the both of them just to break that deadlock, that Walker was completely outmatched." "That doesn't make him Methos," Joe hedged. "Then there's the fact that no one ever got a positive photo identification on the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the one who survived, although you reported that he was probably Methos. You never did explain how you identified him as that. I don't know exactly why the Council let you get away with that. I suppose they saw you as the only Watcher who'd ever got close enough to him to get a positive ID, and let it go." Joe watched her with a reluctant admiration. "That's quite a theory you've cooked up, but it doesn't make Ben Adams Methos." "Maybe not," Amy conceded. "If they aren't one and the same, though, I'd be very curious to know just what it is about you that makes you so attractive to ancient, mysterious Immortals who have managed to avoid Watcher surveillance for hundreds, even thousands, of years." Joe chuckled. "Gee, thanks a lot, Amy. And here I thought we were working out some kind of mutual understanding." That got a smile out of Amy. "I'm your daughter, Joe, not an Immortal." She reached out and squeezed his hand. "I'd like to think that that's a unique relationship, especially since you were once willing to betray one of your best friends to save my life." "You're my daughter," Joe replied, touched by this unexpected moment of understanding. "Of course it's unique." "Good," Amy replied sweetly. "As it's such a unique relationship, I'm willing to wait until you're ready to tell me the truth about your best mate Ben in your own time." *This is just not my day,* Joe thought. ********* Paris, September 5, 2002 Duncan MacLeod didn't have a clue what he had done to deserve the Old Man's savage wit, but he was wishing he could just take his own head to avoid any more of it. He should have stayed in New York. "What is wrong with you, today?" he snapped finally. "Are you still hung over?" "No, MacLeod, I am not hung over," Methos shot back from MacLeod's couch, where he was sprawled in his usual proprietary manner, "because last night, I was never drunk. What the Hell made you think that?" MacLeod reviewed the available evidence from the night before. Walking into a crowded third floor student flat on the Left Bank at 11 pm, the first thing he'd seen was Methos brandishing a plastic cup full of beer and dancing up close and personal with a strawberry blonde Danish girl in a miniskirt and a bustier to the tune of a '60's rock song entitled "Leave My Kitten Alone". Ten minutes later, Methos got both himself and MacLeod evicted from the party for fighting with the girl's hulking Norwegian boyfriend. "It might have been after you punched that girl's boyfriend in the chest and told him that his skull would make a pretty fine addition to your collection of coffee mugs," MacLeod decided, as he poured himself another cup of black coffee. "Besides, that girl was jailbait." "You are all jailbait to me," Methos snorted, waving his hand dismissively. "He dumped beer down my shirt. What was I supposed to do, invite him to an afterhours tea party?" "He only dumped beer on you after you told him that if he did it you'd hit him," MacLeod pointed out. "He was looking for a fight and you handed one right to him." Methos just rolled his eyes and stretched his arms above his head. "I wasn't lying, then, now was I? And what was all that about grabbing me and getting me off into the kitchen to 'give me time to cool off'? I was handling the situation just fine on my own. I didn't need you getting in the middle of it. Since when did enjoying oneself at a party enter the French penal code as an offense, anyway? Really, I can't win with you, some days." Though MacLeod was thinking exactly the same thing about Methos, he chose not to say it. "You were dirty dancing with his girlfriend, and you had been drinking all night. As for 'handling' the situation, you were about ready to put the guy through the wall." "You always say that like it's a bad thing," Methos grumbled. "MacLeod, I'd been nursing that one bloody cup of beer for two hours before you showed up. And as for the girl--hey, she wanted to dance with me, and I didn't see his name tattooed on her ass, okay? Here's a news flash for you, Mac: women are free agents these days. If the boy wanted to get killed over his nonexistent rights to somebody else's body, that was his business. You can be such a Cro Magnon, sometimes." He sighed theatrically. "I really don't know why you showed up there in the first place." "You invited me," MacLeod reminded him. "You said I needed to get out more." "Well, yeah, but I didn't ask you to come be my chaperone, *Dad*." "Well, at the time, I didn't know that you'd *need* one, Old Man." The Buzz that hit them both diverted the conversation onto a completely different track. MacLeod froze, coffee cup in hand. Methos sat up, eyes widening. "Are you expecting company?" Methos said, now looking more like the star of a Wild Discovery documentary than a hungover postgraduate student in Ancient History at the Sorbonne who dressed like a homeless person. "No," MacLeod admitted. Methos swore in three languages, only one of which MacLeod could identify. "It's bad enough when it's one of your friends," Methos griped. "You mean, like you?" MacLeod asked sourly. "Methos!" The shout came from outside the barge. Any retort that Methos had prepared went by the wayside. "Methos, you coward. I know you're in there!" Methos jumped off the couch, pulling on his jacket. He looked upset. "I really hate that there is no back way out of here." "What, so you could run--sorry--beat a strategic retreat?" MacLeod asked snidely. "Something like that." The shouting continued. "Although I wouldn't run. Turn my back on an enemy? Very bad idea, that." Methos stood in the middle of the floor, chewing on his lip and eyeing the stairway. "The last time I turned my back on you, you shot me," MacLeod said, going for his sword, which was propped up near the phone. "Wait here. I'll go find out who it is." "No," Methos said suddenly, as if MacLeod had just made up his mind for him. "Not with somebody who's bellowing my real name in a public place. Who knows what lies he'll tell you about me?" "Or truths," MacLeod growled. Methos shuddered. "I sincerely hope not. You know more than enough about me, already." Pulling his jacket tightly around his body against the early afternoon drizzle outside, he trudged up the steps to the barge's upper deck. MacLeod followed him. As he came up the steps, MacLeod heard Methos complain, "Hey, maybe you could yell a little louder. I don't think they heard you down in Barcelona." As soon as he got up on deck, MacLeod saw the challenger. The Immortal who stood on the cobblestoned bank of the river looked barely twenty, and acted less. He waved his sword, a cutlass that looked like a costume prop, at Methos threateningly when MacLeod appeared. "Only one on one, Methos," he yelled. Methos shoved his hands in his pockets and glared down at the boy. "You must be very young if you're going around reminding everyone about the Rules. How do you know that I am Methos, anyway?" He jerked his head at MacLeod. "Surely he looks more the part than I do." The challenger grinned. "He--they said you'd be the one with the jacket, big nose, and bad hair." "I prefer the term 'aquiline' for the nose," Methos observed acidly. "Much more elegant, I think, than just 'big'. The hair is unfortunate, but not fixable, either. You should see it long. As for the jacket...." he spread his hands, opening the jacket. "It's useful for hiding things. Who is this 'we/they'?" "Come down and fight," the challenger said, instead of answering Methos' question. Methos glanced at MacLeod, then sighed. His shoulders slumped. "Not here," he said. "It is much too public, and I'd still like to visit my friend and mooch his beer after today. He won't let me do that if I wreck his barge with a Quickening." The challenger laughed. "My, aren't we cocky?" "No," Methos retorted. "Just very, very good. Possibly even the best. Or did you think I got to this point without fighting anyone?" MacLeod was startled to hear Methos admit to any exceptional skill. How had Methos convinced himself that he was 'the best' when MacLeod had beaten him every time they sparred together? "Go away, little boy. You'll only catch your death, here." "You can either pick a spot or I can come up there and ruin your friend's nice, little boat, asshole," the challenger said nastily. "Your choice." "Fine. My choice; your funeral." MacLeod could hear Methos' temper fraying. Methos named a square a few miles away, suggesting that the challenger meet him there in an hour. The challenger acknowledged the arrangement before turning to walk away. Before he left, however, he glanced back and pointed at Methos. "Don't even think about trying to duck out on me," he warned. "If you don't show up, I'll come find you. This will be the first place I look." "Oh, child. I will be there, whether you like it or not." Methos watched the departing Immortal until he disappeared onto a side street. "I need your car, Mac," he said. "No way," MacLeod said, heading back down the stairs and into the kitchen for his car keys. Methos followed. "I'm coming with you," MacLeod declared, snatching the keys up from the counter and dangling them in front of Methos' face. Methos regarded him for a few seconds. He shrugged. "Nannying me again, are you? Whatever. If you think that you can explain your excess presence at my challenge to that walking dysfunctional brain stem, you go right ahead. Who am I to argue with the wisdom of the great Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod? But I'm driving." He made a grab for the keys. MacLeod pulled them out of reach. "Not *my* car, you're not," he insisted. "Now, let's go. I want to see what the ground is like at the site." Methos rolled his eyes. "I think I prefer you thinking that I'm the spawn of the Devil to you treating me like a child. Fine. You drive, then. You're like a constipated tortoise on the road, anyway. I ought to be able to get in a nice nap on the way there." They arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Methos did, indeed, nap. Methos' challenger had not yet arrived, giving MacLeod time to check out the ground. The garden was small, just a space behind an unoccupied house. Nobody, it seemed, was willing to brave the fine drizzle falling from the dull grey sky to visit it. "Not too bad," Methos said approvingly, planting his sword's tip in the spongy ground and leaning on the hilt. "A bit slippery, but it's better than those cobblestones in front of your barge. I didn't expect an idiot like that boy to pick a nice, sunny day for a Challenge. Heaven forbid that it be convenient for anybody." "This isn't funny, Methos," MacLeod growled back. "This kid could kill you. Stop treating it like a game." Methos snickered. "MacLeod, it *is* a game, remember? The Game." MacLeod's retort was curtailed by the challenger's Buzz. This kid, MacLeod decided sourly, had a really irritating sense of timing. The challenger came through an archway into the garden, swinging his sword as if it were a child's toy. Gripping his own sword, MacLeod watched him approach. He glanced at Methos. The Old Man stood, his hands resting on the hilt of his Ivanhoe sword, smiling. How he managed to look both as innocent as a puppy and as lethal as a fossilised velociraptor claw always mystified MacLeod. Unfazed, the kid approached Methos and stopped a few feet away. He glared over at MacLeod. "I thought I told you not to bring your friend, Methos," he snapped. "As a matter of fact, you didn't," Methos responded. "I wouldn't worry about him, though. He's much too honourable to challenge you while you're helpless." The challenger scowled at MacLeod. "How do I know you're telling the truth, you old bastard?" "You don't," Methos retorted. "You can either fight me, anyway, or you can simply walk away. It's your call." He lifted his sword and held it out before him. "Shall we?" The challenger leveled his own sword at Methos. "Let's do it," he snarled. Before the last word had left the kid's mouth, Methos leapt at him, lashing out with his sword. Though the challenger blocked in time, he was physically driven back by the blow. As MacLeod watched, startled, Methos drove in like a shark, throwing his opponent off balance. Clearly, he had no intention of playing with his challenger, only finishing the fight with a minimum of effort. Within seven moves, he had disarmed the challenger. The cutlass flew from the kid's hand. Panting, the challenger dove after it. Methos kicked the weapon away before the kid could reach it. Methos placed his sword on his opponent's neck. Caught on his hands and knees, the challenger froze. MacLeod saw that he was panting now with fear, as well as with exertion. Yet, he still did not voice it. MacLeod waited for Methos to deliver the coup de grace. Methos raised the sword, gripping the pommel with his other hand to increase the force of the blow. The challenger shut his eyes. Methos hesitated. "Tell me who set you on me and I'll spare your life," he said. "Fuck you!" The kid snarled back. Methos sighed, bringing the sword down level with his shoulders. "Child, the information is worth far more to me than your head. It's a gift. Take it. Tell me who gave you my name and I'll let you walk away." "Piss off!" The challenger lunged towards the cutlass. Methos kicked him in the face, knocking him down. As the kid struggled back to his knees, Methos came up behind him and swung the Ivanhoe, one-handed, connecting with a meaty crunch. The challenger's head flew off his shoulders, thumped to the ground, and rolled a few feet before it stopped. A grimace of terror and defiance still distorted the head's features. As MacLeod watched, the face relaxed into slack death. MacLeod turned his attention back to Methos. The Old Man stood over the sprawled body, head bowed, shoulders slumped. "Shit," he said, sounding tired and sad as the glowing fog of the challenger's Quickening rose about his feet. "I wish the little git had just told me." The Quickening hit him. It was as small and pathetic as its source. It consisted of eleven bolts of lightning that made Methos grunt in agony, but not scream outright or convulsively fling away his sword. After a minute or so, it died away. Methos turned and staggered back toward MacLeod. MacLeod caught him as his knees gave out. "He was a fucking car mechanic," Methos growled, the cadence of the challenger's accent still echoing in his voice. "Can you believe it?" "Come on, Old Man," MacLeod said, anxious not to explain a decapitated body with a cauterised neck to any authorities. "Let's get out of here before the police show up. You can tell me about it back at the barge." Methos snorted. "There's nothing to tell, Mac." His voice was already back to normal. "That's what's so sad about it. And don't start in about how I should have waited for him to get his sword back, first." "I didn't--" MacLeod protested. The Buzz of an approaching Immortal interrupted him. "Not *again*," Methos complained, pushing away from MacLeod and raising his sword. MacLeod drew his katana. An Immortal walked through the archway. The newcomer was a tall man with graying red hair. He wore a black wool overcoat. When he saw Methos, he smiled. "Hello, Pierson," he said. "Long time, no see." "Chris Mancuso," Methos replied, sounding wearily amused. "Son of a bitch. I should've known." ********* "Mark! I didn't know you were coming to the convention this year." Hearing his name being called, Mark Gibbon peered out from under the table that he was setting up to see Jerry Merrick, an inker from Whatever Comics, standing a few feet away. "Hi, Jerry," he replied, as Jerry ambled over. "Yeah, I hadn't been to a comic con in awhile, so I decided to come after all." Mark liked Jerry, even if the kid was a hopeless geek and UFO watcher. Jerry might possess the social skills of an iguana, but anyone who was willing to put up with that got a friend more fiercely loyal than a pit bull. His hands shoved in his pockets, Jerry watched Mark work. "Well, it's just, you know, you've always avoided Paris in the past," he explained. "I'm kinda surprised to see you here, especially at such a little con." Mark chuckled. "I like little cons. There's not as much commercial crap and I can talk to the fans longer. Besides, I thought it was time to give Paris a try." It had been nine years since he'd snuck in for Darius' memorial service, after all. Maybe it was time to test the boundaries of his 'treaty' with Adam Pierson a bit. For all he knew, the bastard might have left town years ago. "Okay," Jerry let it pass. "So, you finished 'Barbaros' yet?" "Yeah, I've got the galley proof at home ready to send in for the final edit. I had a poster of the cover made up. I brought a bunch of copies with me as a promotional. Hang on. Let me finish this table, first." Mark locked the braces in place, before crawling out from under the table. He stood up, ran a hand through his black, curly hair a few times, and brushed himself off. "Get me that tablecloth, could you, Jerry?" "Sure." Jerry pulled out the cloth from one of the boxes Mark had brought in from his truck. With the expert flick of an experienced convention guest, he unfolded it across the table. "Thanks, Jer. Here, help me with this, will you?" Mark pulled a poster out of its tube and carefully unrolled it. As Jerry moved to catch one end of it to keep it from unrolling, his mouth fell open. "Holy shit! This is the new cover?" he asked. "Yep." Jerry didn't need to be asked to help tack it up on the background behind Mark's table. Mark would probably have been hard put to stop him. Between the two of them, Mark and Jerry soon had the poster set up and smoothed out. Mark stepped back to admire it. The poster was a panoramic view about two feet long and a foot and half wide. It showed a field in ancient Italy, in the aftermath of a great battle. Some sections of the field remained pristine and golden. Others were torn up into clods of mud and blood. Still others burned. In the foreground stood a single, triumphant figure. He wore a white tunic and trousers, a leather cuirass, boots, and a grey skull mask lifted to reveal his blue- painted face. His long brown hair blew in the wind. Blood covered his sword, which hung from his hand, all the way to the hilt. His green eyes stared coldly out of the picture, as if warning viewers that someday they would join the mangled bodies heaped about his feet. "Damn! That's the best one so far," Jerry exclaimed. "I thought you might like it," Mark purred. "I figure the exposure can't hurt. It's not as though I'm working for DC Comics." Jerry laughed. "Oh, yeah. Like DC or Marvel Comics would ever do anything like 'Barbaros'. I don't think so. The closest they ever got was "Kill Your Boyfriend" with their Vertigo spin-off line. That was just a "look how crazy those Brits are" experiment, I think." "Here, take one," Mark pulled another poster tube out of the box and handed it to Jerry. Jerry looked startled, as he always did when Mark showed him an unexpected kindness. No matter how many times Mark was nice to Jerry, he could never seem to convince the poor kid that he was being sincere. "Thanks, Mark. That's great," Jerry said. He stared again at the poster behind the table. "Man, I wish I could do your realism. How do you manage that?" "It's real because I take it from real life," Mark answered with more honesty than was perhaps safe for him. "Real people that I've known." He stared critically at the poster. "Of course, it's been a while since I've seen the guy I used for this scene. I may have gotten a few of the details wrong." And if Adam Pierson happened to wander in and take insult at it, well, that was what the whole business with swords and challenges was for. Jerry shook his head. "Mark, you're such a kidder. You must really scare the fans sometimes." Despite his paranoia about black helicopters and government conspiracies, Jerry was quite naive about the hidden dangers of the world around him. "I mean, come on, if you really took that from real life, you'd have to be, like, two thousand years old." "Yeah, I would," Mark admitted. "Then again, maybe I am." Jerry laughed. Mark laughed, too, even though he was being serious. Sometimes, the best way to lie was to tell the truth in such a way that nobody would ever believe you. ********* Capua, 74 BC Marcus Atticus sat down gingerly on the wooden bench next to Petronius, before handing one of the two cups of wine that he was holding to his companion. The afternoon sun filtered through the awning which flapped in the wind above their seats. The crowd in the amphitheatre seemed larger than usual on a non-festival day. Petronius, himself, was in an excellent mood, his usually grim, swarthy face transformed by a smile. The old soldier enjoyed a good fight in the arena more than sport with a beautiful woman. Twenty years on the borders of the Republic had hardened him to any sight of blood or suffering. It was dangerous for Atticus to spend too much time around Petronius. Even with only one eye, the vicious old Italian might eventually notice that Atticus had aged little in their twenty years of service together. Still, Atticus enjoyed Petronius' company. Petronius knew no fear, and he respected Atticus, which was no mean thing. "So, whose funeral are the munera commemorating today, you bloodthirsty old bastard?" Atticus asked. "What have we got, a few pairs of criminals dying for some minor bureaucrat whose nephew made a fortune tax farming in Africa?" Petronius grinned and licked his lips. "Better. Much better. Who cares about a few escaped slaves? They're nothing compared to a good gladiator fight. You know that. That's what I've been waiting for." "Of course," Atticus laughed. "How many pairs of fighters this afternoon?" "Three. But I'm only interested in the first combat. That one will be the best, you'll see. Seems the nephew in question was able to scare up a few extra denarii to stage some decent fights this week. I knew you wouldn't show until after lunch." Atticus grimaced at Petronius. "I had business to attend to this morning, Petronius. I told you that." Petronius snickered, grabbing his crotch under his tunic. "Oh, I know what your 'business' was, old friend." He leaned over and elbowed Atticus in the ribs. "That Nubian whore of yours has been keeping you in bed longer than usual, I see. She's been making a fair pile of denarii off you in the past few weeks. I can still smell her on you." Atticus rolled his eyes, but let it pass. A blast of the trumpet announced the commencement of the afternoon's entertainment. People in the crowd stirred, chattering to each other excitedly as a door opened in the podium wall below. First came the referee for the fight. Normally, there were two. Two men, each bearing a lance, a long, straight sword, and an oval shield, trotted out onto the killing sands in his wake. From a different door, a swordsman with gladius, legionary's scutum, and helmet stomped out into the sunlight. "What, one samnite against two galli?" Atticus said disgustedly. "That's it? And where's the other referee?" "It's called limiting your acceptable losses. They'd rather lose one referee than two, on top of the three gladiators." Petronius put a finger to his lips. "Just watch. You'll like this." Below, in the arena, a third door opposite Atticus and Petronius opened. At first, nothing happened. Then, as if he were entering a garden in his villa, a fourth man strolled out. He wore only a ragged-edged, knee- length blue tunic, instead of the traditional subligaculum [loincloth] and balteus [belt] of a gladiator. He was very tall, long of limb and fair- skinned--some sort of German or Gallic barbarian. His shaggy, brown hair had grown out from what appeared to have once been a military cut. He was clean-shaven. "He's Thracian," Petronius chortled, passing a handful of honey-coated sweetmeats to Atticus. "An army deserter, so they claim." "Thracian? He's not armed like a thraex," Atticus noted, puzzled. "Where's his helmet and shield? What is this, an execution? He looks like a criminal. It's past lunch. I thought they had dispatched all the noxii already." A Thracian gladiator usually carried a curved sword and wore a fair amount of armour. The barbarian thraex had nothing but his tunic, not even sandals. He did not seem concerned. He swaggered further out into the arena, turning his head to watch each in turn of the three other gladiators closing in on him. "Trust me," Petronius echoed the barbarian's casual attitude. "He doesn't need any weapons." As the samnis and the galli tried to hem him in, the thraex went to the wall. He sidled along it towards Atticus and Petronius, disappearing from view for a moment under their side of the podium. The spectators around Atticus and Petronius booed and began to throw trash into the arena. "Fools," Petronius spat, as the three other gladiators also vanished under the shadow of the podium. "He's just started." "Well, I'm impressed so far," Atticus said sarcastically, then shut his mouth as he felt the familiar signature of an Immortal. Was it one of the gladiators or someone in the crowd? "Just wait. He's setting them up--Ah!" At Petronius' exclamation, the thraex burst out into the middle of the arena, dragging the samnis, with his own gladius, by the throat. As the two fighters went, the Immortal signature faded. A broad trail of blood soaked into the sand behind them while the crowd roared in approval. The chosen victim had become the hero. His shield lost, the samnis scrabbled at the sword hooked under his helmet near the pommel, even as it cut through his windpipe. Halfway out to the middle of the arena, his arms fell limp. With a final crack and a twist of the sword from the thraex, the samnis' head came off. His body dropped to the sand. As if this signaled something to him, the thraex stopped and spun in place, kicking the samnis' head away. He swung the sword in a wide arc, spraying blood across the sand. After a pause, the two galli crept back out into view. They looked unnerved. Atticus didn't blame them. The Immortal obviously wasn't the samnis. The thraex did something then that made Atticus sit right up on his bench. Holding out his left hand to the remaining gladiators, the barbarian sliced it open. He rubbed his palm down over the right side of his face, leaving a broad, dark swath of blood. Some of it was the samnis'; most of it was the thraex's own. He smiled at his foes, baring his teeth. Atticus stared at the man, puzzled. He had seen that marking before. So simple. So brutal. Where.... Atticus' head snapped back. The breath hissed through his teeth as he remembered. It had been over three centuries ago, before his first death. Barbarians had come down from Gaul and overrun Rome, taking everything but the Capitol Hill, burning the city around the fortress. Among them had ridden four men more noted for their butchery than the others. Two of them had been unremarkable in their brutality, mere barbarians. The third had been of different quality--subtle, clever. Still, he had been a barbarian, too, interested only in gold and plunder. The fourth.... While the others wore black, he wore white, and rode a white horse. While they painted their faces with black symbols of rude complexity, he favoured a single, broad blue stripe down the right side of his face. He had been literate, educated, merciless. When the senators first tried to pass off a useless treaty on the barbarians, he had caught the ruse. Ordering the offending scribe brought before him, he hacked off the man's limbs in front of the horrified ambassadors. After that, he forced them to kneel in the man's blood and swear to new terms. "That man is no deserter," Atticus declared. Petronius shrugged. "You know how some of the recruiters are. They make mistakes." Atticus snorted derisively. "You mean they kidnap freemen and make up some cover story when they sell them to the arena. He's probably still wearing what he had on when they took him off the street." "Who cares, when you end up with a magnificent specimen like our fine Thracian down there?" Petronius retorted, unperturbed. "Look at him now. He's stalking the galli. How sweet." The thraex was indeed stalking the two remaining gladiators. Goaded by the referee and the crowd, who were impatient to see the fight proceed, the two galli were trying to hem in the thraex, to wear him down. Instead, he was the one doing it to them. Paying no heed to the referee's barked orders, he remained in a crouch, waiting while the galli circled in. When one of them came within two swordlengths, he lashed out at him, causing the man to skitter away. The other gallus came at the thraex's back, casting his lance. The thraex, probably alerted by the hiss of the lance cutting through the air, threw himself prone onto the sand. The lance thumped into the ground beyond his head. When the gallus leapt forward to stab the thraex with his sword, the barbarian rolled onto his back, grabbing the other man's shield and dragging the gallus towards him. Using his enemy's own shield to protect himself, the thraex brought up his sword, impaling the gallus on its point. The gallus fell forward onto the thraex. Above and behind Atticus and Petronius, several women shrieked in outright orgasmic delight. The enjoyment that some women took in seeing men die in the arena chilled Atticus. The Roman optimates might fool themselves that their women were tranquil keepers of the domestic hearth. He knew better. He had seen barbarian women in battle. As far as he was concerned, more women were maenads than mothers. They might worship Juno and Vesta by day, but by night, they still bowed down to Hecate. The gods alone knew what would happen if they ever gained dominion over the world. How many women, he wondered, waited for that day, honing their castrating knives in secret? Untroubled by such musings, Petronius shook his head and laughed. "There'll be some hard-pressed husbands in those households, tonight." "They should ban women from the games," Atticus said darkly. "Good luck trying that, Marcus," Petronius snickered. "You'd sooner get them to give up their own children." Out on the sand, the thraex had thrown off his opponent's body, losing the gladius in the process. He scrambled to his feet. The surviving gallus pressed his advantage by trying to stab the thraex with his lance. Dodging the lance, the thraex sprinted back to the wall, where he led the gallus on a wild chase around the arena. Normally, the galli's relative lack of armour gave them an advantage in speed. The thraex, however, had longer legs than his remaining opponent and no armour at all. He stayed well ahead of the gallus. The crowd seemed undecided about this tactic--half of them booing the thraex, the other half shouting advice at him. The thraex ignored both sides. After all, it was his life, not theirs, at risk. The thraex turned at bay at the other side of the arena. He leaned over, holding his ribs and panting as the gallus advanced on him. When the gallus came close enough to skewer his prey, the thraex pushed off from the wall and sprinted back out into the center of the arena. He had been shamming his windedness, very clever. The gallus pelted after him. The thraex ran straight for the dead gallus. Reaching the body, he somersaulted over it and landed on the other side, going into a roll. As he came back up, he scrabbled for the dead man's lance, yanking it out of the sand. The crowd went dead silent. Seeing the thraex grab the lance, the gallus ran forward to stab him in the back. Before the gallus could get close enough, the thraex rose up on one knee, turned and threw the lance. It struck the gallus in the belly, which wasn't as quick a kill as hitting the chest, but was a good enough target. The gallus went down. The thraex stood up and yanked the gladius out of the first gallus' chest. The other gallus was rolling around in agony a few swordlengths away, trying to pull the lance out of his gut. Stalking over to the gallus, the thraex looked down at the wounded man. He cocked his head to one side, obviously considering how best to proceed. The crowd was screaming its bloodlust. Petronius leapt to his feet with the others, waving his thumb at the thraex in the unmistakable gesture of death. It was just as well that the spectators wanted the fatal outcome. The gallus was already mortally wounded. Even if he were not, Atticus doubted that anything would stop the thraex from sating his bloodlust on his hapless opponent. As the gallus' convulsions weakened, the barbarian placed his bare foot on one side of the man's jaw and rolled his head sharply to one side. The gallus' body jerked as his neck snapped. His hands and feet beat at the sand for a few more moments, even though his head lay at an unnatural angle. The thraex watched the gallus' death throes with a look of detached interest, then turned his attention to the referee. A shout of laughter broke from the spectators at this new development. Backing away from the thraex in obvious alarm, the referee then ran to the nearest door and pounded on it. When the door opened, he disappeared inside. It shut in the pursuing thraex's face. The barbarian slammed against the door, roaring in frustration--the first time Atticus had heard his voice. He turned back into the arena, eyes wild. "Here comes the fun part," Petronius said, licking his lips in anticipation. Atticus stared at Petronius incredulously. "What fun part? The fight's over." Petronius laughed. "Now, they get to put him back." Two doors opened in the podium. Four men ran out carrying two nets. Seeing them, the thraex tried to get back to the wall. They cut him off. There was nowhere to go. Refusing to accept the outcome, the thraex charged one of the unarmed netmen, slashing his arm before the other pair could come up from behind him and throw their net over him. He tried to cut at the choking strings with his gladius as the second net went over his head, as well, to no avail. Down he went, thrashing and howling in rage. He was still fighting the nets while they dragged him out of the arena. "Is he a prime example of barbarian *uiritas* or what?" Petronius leered. "He's got balls. I'll give him that," Atticus admitted. *Not to mention a real sense of showmanship,* he thought. "What's his name?" "Spartacus." "Spartacus," Atticus repeated, half to himself. *You used to have another name,* he thought. *When I last saw you.* Somehow, he did not think that Death found Italy any more impressive this time around than when he had left her burning at his back three centuries ago. ********* I'm brave enough to be crazy, strong enough to be weak. See all these heroes with feet of clay whose mighty ships have sprung a leak. And I want you to tell me, darlin', just what do you believe in now? Paris, September 5, 2002 "It was Atticus," Crixus (currently masquerading as fearless Watcher Chris Mancuso) murmurs to me as we walk back to MacLeod's car. It took us several hours to find a decent place to bury the car mechanic's body. It's already getting dark. Neither Crixus nor MacLeod understood my need to give my challenger his own grave, however anonymous. Being warrior-types, they tend to leave their victims for the Watchers to clean up, trusting that the forensics won't catch up with them. In the end, I dug the hole. "Uhhuh," I reply noncommittally, tossing MacLeod's shovel into the boot of his car. I'm tired. I ache, and I have a feeling that Crixus knows more about my latest kill than he's let on so far. This has something to do with Marcus Atticus, I can tell. Global warming is Atticus' fault, too, according to Crixus. Crixus has hated that man for over two thousand years. I wish he would let it be. "Sir, you have to take this seriously! He's here, in town. He's after your head!" A few lengths ahead of us, MacLeod looks back over his shoulder, obviously curious. Crixus has shunned him, trying to chivvy me off alone. I have no intention of letting him do that. "I just killed somebody. I'm shattered," I tell him. "Why don't we continue this neverending conversation over a drink? A friend of mine owns a nice little jazz place near here, Le Blues Bar. He's a Watcher. You guys can play happy secret societies." Crixus looks uneasy. "That might not be such a good idea. We've, um, already met." "I see." And I do. This is a Crixus head game all the way. "Let me connect the dots: you pop into town looking for me, hook up with the local Watcher network to see what you can find, and decide to have a little fun with them while you're at it. How am I doing so far?" Crixus scowls at me. "Don't be such a hypocrite. You used them for ten years." He would think that. That tattoo on his wrist is only temporary--like a false ID pass to get him into a company that he wants to raid. Crixus spied on high-tech corporations for a living before he joined the Watchers in the 1980s. "Not to hunt; never to hunt." I'm surprised by my own vehemence. I try to tone it down because I've caught MacLeod's attention. He's hanging back a bit, eavesdropping more obviously than before. Crixus seems too wrapped up in our argument to notice. MacLeod isn't a high contrast object on his radar. I count to ten silently in Hittite. "I am getting a little tired of explaining my membership in the Watchers to all and sundry. Technically, there is no prohibition against an Immortal joining the Watchers. It is one of those loopholes that people create with their own preconceptions, like: 'No man born of woman can kill me'. As long as I followed the rules, I did not violate my oath. Therefore, I could be a Watcher in good standing." Crixus stares at me. "Are you seriously telling me that you considered yourself to be a real Watcher? Oh, come on. Adam Pierson wasn't even a real person!" "'Watch and record, but never interfere'," I retort. "I watched, I recorded and I stayed the Hell away from other Immortals. That's about as non-interfering as you can get." I raise my voice. "I was not some meddling busy-body, like some people I could name." MacLeod's shoulders jerk as he straightens in outrage. He stops dead and rounds on us. "Just what is that supposed to mean?" he demands. I smile at this opportunity. "Oh, so you were listening to us, after all." MacLeod flushes when he realises I've caught him out. "I wasn't--I dinna.... Well, what am I supposed to do when some strange friend of yours shows up in town out of the blue?" "For a start," I retort, "I would prefer that you not kill this one." Crixus turns pale. He hasn't fought much, lately. MacLeod looks as though he'd like to rip my head off with his bare hands. As fun as counting coup on him is, antagonising him isn't the best of ideas right now. I need these two in sight and in earshot. They are sincere men of principle. I don't trust either as far as I could throw them both at once. I turn to Crixus. "MacLeod's got a point, Chris," I say. "Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of him. If you don't like that, feel free to employ that return ticket to wherever that I am sure you have in your wallet." Crixus looks disgusted; he knows when he's been outmanoeuvred. "Fine," he sighs. "Lead on, MacDuff." ********* Joe looks up at our arrival. When he sees us, his face screws up--he always was a lousy liar. The question is, what is he lying about today? "Nice to see you again, Mr. Mancuso," he says. "I see you found him." "Yeah, something like that," Crixus replies before I can think of something suitably obscure and insensitive. "I followed the lightshow." "I see." Joe looks as though he is weighing his options. "Who was it this time, Mac?" I glance at MacLeod, who gazes at the stage rather than meet my eyes. The least he could do would be to take the credit for me, but he is too honest to let me off the hook. May the gods damn honest men. I pull out a chair from one of the tables, collapsing on it with a sigh of relief. "Actually, it was me, Joe." Joe laughs. "You? Mister I-Don't-Want-To-Get- Involved? What did you do? Sleep with his sister?" So much for the respect of my so-called friends. "If I did, it wasn't that memorable," I sneer. "I'd swear that I'd never seen him before in my life, and he didn't supply either a name or a reason. Somebody set him on me. He didn't supply that person's name or reason, either, although I did give him a chance to tell me. He did not take it." "His name was Greg Johnston," Crixus speaks up helpfully. "He was 37 years old. His first death occurred in 1982, near Sarasota, New York, where he crashed his car into a tree. He's won six challenges since then. He didn't win this one." I fold my arms and cock my head to one side. "You would know all of this because...?" Crixus turns to MacLeod and Joe. "I need to speak with Mr. Pierson alone. Do you think you guys could go hang out somewhere for awhile?" "Sure," Joe says, just as MacLeod is indignantly gearing up to say 'No'. MacLeod looks surprised. He is not the only one. "I've got something out back I've been meaning to show you," Joe tells him. So much for my plan to keep Crixus from getting me off alone. Thanks a lot, Joe, old buddy. I watch them head out back, feeling no small resentment. The 'something' is probably some titbit of information that Joe would never deign to pass on to me. After all, I'm an Immortal, he's a Watcher. It's not his job to make my life easier, now is it? I turn my attention back to the immediate problem, which is Crixus. "You set me up, didn't you, Crixus, old pal?" I snarl as I go to the bar to grab myself a much- needed beer. "Why don't you go ahead and tell me how this improves our venerable friendship?" "It wasn't me," Crixus replies. "It was Atticus." "Bollocks," I say. I have done enough manual labour for one day. I let him get his own bloody beer. He does so, comes back and sits down across from me. I can see that he is about to try to sell me prime swampland in Florida. "He's in town," he says. "Who? Atticus? You said that, already. So what?" As it turns out, I've known for months. Atticus' current incarnation is a well-known, freelance comic book artist. The local comic book shop that I like to visit has been speculating about his appearance at this week's Ages of Gold convention for months. I've been following his latest four part series, 'Barbaros', with a fair amount of enjoyment. The son of a bitch did once swear to make me pay for sacking Rome in 394 BC. If caricaturing my years as Death in a comic book is the worst thing that Atticus plans to do to me this millennium, I wish him all the best. Crixus, of course, doesn't give a damn about quiet, amiable pursuits like comic books. "What do you mean, so what?! He's broken the agreement, that's what." I suck down a good portion of my beer. "That agreement was fifteen years old," I say, setting the beer back down on the table. "It was time to renegotiate it anyway." "He doesn't want to renegotiate, Sir." Ah, here's the hook. "He's hunting you! And you're letting him!" "He hasn't hunted me in over eight hundred years," I retort. "He's not going to start again now." At least, I hope not. I had my chance to kill Atticus over two thousand years ago. If I were going to do it, I would have done it then. "He murdered your wife! He killed my entire family!" And here is the line. "That was Darius," I correct him. "Who is now dead." Crixus spits on the floor. "Good riddance, too. A penitent monk, my ass! He just needed an excuse to hide out on Holy Ground for sixteen centuries. But what does it matter? You know Atticus was the one who put him up to it. Are you telling me that you're willing to overlook all the loved ones he's killed while hunting you? Are you seriously going to let their shades go unavenged?" Now, that would be the sinker. I shrug. "They're dead. We're not. Killing Atticus won't change the former condition, but going after him may well change the latter. Your family and my wife died two thousand years ago, Crixus. It is past time to let it be." "I have never understood this." Crixus shakes his head in wonder. "Why? Why won't you do it?" "I had my chance." Having drained my beer, I start picking at the label. "It's not as though you've got no taste for killing. I've seen the bloodlust in your eyes. I've seen you mad with it! Why? Why spare him when you haven't spared so many others?" I look Crixus in the eye for the first time since we entered Joe's. "You want to know why? You really want to know?" Crixus glares back at me. "Yes." "All right. I'll tell you." I sit up straight in my chair and push the beer bottle away. "When I led you all against Rome I had just spent a thousand years killing. I killed over ten thousand people in that time, Crixus. Not by proxy, not from a distance, and not indirectly. Those were the ones that I killed with my own hands and my own sword. I spared Atticus simply because I could. When they brought him to my tent in Picenum and forced him to kneel in front of me, I realised that I didn't *have* to kill him. Oh, I'd've enjoyed it. And it was probably the smart thing to do. Hell, they would have probably called me Jupiter incarnate after seeing the Quickening. But I did not have to do it. I could choose not to." I tap my head with my finger. "That day, I chose not to. I thought with my head and not with my balls, for once. That one decision became the watershed between the creature I was and the man I am now. I've changed. Someday, I would love to find somebody who believes that, but I honestly have. I like the way I am. I do not want to change back. As long as I don't kill Marcus Atticus, as long as I live and let him be, I really don't think that I have to worry about that." Chris just stares at me, unblinking, for a moment. Then, he gets up, drains his beer, carefully puts the bottle back on the bar, and walks out. I sigh. "I didn't think you'd understand," I tell the empty air. I go get myself another beer. ********* Joe hoped he was doing the right thing. He knew he was risking pissing Methos off in a big way but he had to get MacLeod into the loop on this. It was a damned shame Mancuso had to blow Methos' big secret right in front of Amy. Methos wasn't going to appreciate finding out how many people knew his business tonight. "I don't think we should leave Methos alone with that guy, Joe," MacLeod said, as soon as Joe led him through the curtain into his backroom. "Mac, we need to talk," Joe insisted, dispensing with the preamble. "I think you should look at this." He picked up the file that Mancuso had given him and held it out to MacLeod. Mac grabbed it out of his hand, looking impatient. As he flipped through the file, though, the look changed to puzzlement, then concern. "Who gave this to you?" he demanded. Joe jerked his chin back toward the curtain. "Methos' buddy, Chris Mancuso." *I should have known Mancuso wasn't being straight about that,* he thought. MacLeod's face tightened with anger. "That son of a bitch. And you trusted him?" Joe stared at MacLeod, confused. "Considering the way the Old Man's been acting lately, I don't have any reason to believe that the information's false, if that's what you mean. Mancuso's a Watcher. What reason would he have to lie?" "Well, for a start, he's also an Immortal. He's obviously some sort of fraud." Joe tilted his head back and closed his eyes. "Damn," he said, half to himself. "I thought something was up with that guy." "Then, why didn't you check up on him?" MacLeod began to pace back and forth in front of Joe's computer. "I did," Joe protested. "The problem is that he checks out." MacLeod stopped and glared at him. "I looked him up in the database, Mac. He's been a Watcher since 1988. It's all in there--picture, background info.... Even his fingerprints matched." "You checked his *fingerprints*?" MacLeod asked incredulously. Joe gave him a disgusted look. "Mac, you give 'em a drink, you dust the bottle with talcum powder and you match 'em up with the file. It ain't brain surgery. He probably even knew that I was doing it. Look, they seemed chummy enough out there. They're probably having a good laugh together at how they both managed to fool the Watchers for so many years. I don't think the Old Man's gonna lose his head tonight. Anyway, we've got a bigger problem." "This, you mean." MacLeod held up the file. "You think this is real?" Joe nodded slowly. "Like I said, the Old Man's been acting real funny lately. I mean, he's always a bit gun shy, but.... I dunno. I'm just worried about him, okay? I think we should talk to him--together." MacLeod burst out laughing. "Oh, he will love that." Joe chuckled. "That's why I think we should do it together. That way, he can't weasel out of it." ********* The first indication that things, as usual with Methos, were not going to go according to plan came when they went back out to the bar. Methos was sitting there alone, morosely nursing a beer. It did not look like his first. "Hey, where'd your buddy go?" Joe asked, as he and MacLeod got drinks and sat down at the table. As they'd agreed in the backroom, Joe sat across from Methos and MacLeod sat next to him. Staring at his beer, Methos shrugged. "We had a chat about old times--exchanged a few frank and honest opinions. He left." His voice was a monotone. He looked up and his eyes narrowed. Damn. He'd noticed that he was boxed in. In order to leave, he'd have to get past either Joe or MacLeod. "You and MacLeod finish your bit of business?" he asked, sounding warier than Joe had hoped. Joe glanced at MacLeod, who looked uncomfortable. "Uh, yeah," Joe said. "I just had to tell him, um, something that I'd heard about the barge." Methos looked skeptical. "Right. I'm sure that whatever Immortal who's got MacLeod's back up this week will appreciate all those DIY tips you've been passing on to Mac about fixing up that boat." Joe thought that Mac let the jibe pass with unusual restraint. "Methos," Mac said. "We were wondering if we could talk to you. Something's come up." "Can't it wait? I really am shattered tonight." Methos rubbed his face with his hand. There was sand in his hair. Joe, looking at him, suddenly realised how tired he must be. "That Quickening took a lot out of me." "I thought you said it wasn't that large of a Quickening," Joe pointed out. "Sometimes, it's the little ones that knock you on your bum, Joe," Methos explained. "You don't get enough energy to make you jittery, but you're still as drained as if you'd taken in a big one. It doesn't help when you have to dig the guy a grave afterwards." He stood up. "I'll see you guys tomorrow. You can tell me all about Mac's barge project then, okay?" "But--" MacLeod began. "Not tonight, Mac. I've got a headache." Pulling on his coat, Methos edged past MacLeod and Joe. For a wild moment, Joe considered sticking his cane out and tripping the Old Man to keep him there. He wisely discarded the idea. Methos really didn't look in the mood for that. "That went well," Joe said, after the door closed and Methos' steps faded. "You could have stopped him," MacLeod accused him. "So could you," Joe shot back. "Why didn't you?" MacLeod looked down at the table. Joe grimaced in near sympathy. "That's what I thought," he said, draining his scotch. ********* Mark had packed up his table for the night and was heading out to his rented van when he felt a Buzz. He stopped and pulled his weapon, a replica of a 15th century, hand-and-a-half Bastard sword, out of his coat. Turning in a slow circle, he saw no one. "Who's there?" he called, confident that he could take his challenger, as long as he could see him--or her. Although Mark tried to look harmless, it was only camouflage. He had racked up twelve challenges in the past five years. Somehow, the others kept finding him. The human population of the world increased every day-- Mortals and Immortals alike. The young ones were, if anything, more ferocious than the few ancients whom he encountered. The old ones usually just wanted to live and let live. As Mark backed towards his van, his stalker stepped out of the shadows into the dimly lit parking lot. Sword drawn, the man approached to within three swordlengths. "I think you know who I am, Atticus," he said. "Crixus," Mark said, fishing the name out of his memory like a rotten apple core out of the pocket of an old coat. The man was Spartacus' Gallic lieutenant from his original rebellion. Until Crixus had spoken, Mark honestly had not remembered him. He raised his sword. "I'll bet I know why you're here." Crixus smiled coldly. "I'm not here for an autograph, Atticus, if that's what you were thinking." "So this is a challenge. Does Spartacus know you're here?" Dammit! He should have known that Pierson would never let his violation of the treaty go unchallenged. Crixus circled to Mark's right. Mark turned with him, holding out his sword in defense. "You didn't answer my question, Crixus." "There can be only One, Atticus. You know that." Crixus pointed his sword, a Viking-style blade, at Mark. Mark angled his own sword to block the intended move. "Bullshit," he spat. "This doesn't have anything to do with the Game. You're here for revenge, pure and simple. Otherwise, your boss would have come instead." Crixus grimaced in rage. "You killed my family! You killed his wife!" "And you killed my friends! Both of you! A lot of them!" Mark didn't bother to say that he hadn't been there when Crixus' family had been killed. After he heard that Spartacus was hiding out in Gaul, Mark had sent Darius after the man. He himself had just died in front of two generals. He couldn't risk going after Spartacus himself, no matter how much he longed to do it. Darius had been acting on Mark's orders when he raided Spartacus' village. Killing Crixus' family had been a bonus. "Then you don't deny it, you murdering bastard?" Crixus was closing the distance between them. "I deny nothing!" Mark said indignantly. "Unlike you, I take responsibility for my actions. You had options, Crixus. Much as I used to hate your boss, I have to admit that he deserved better than a lieutenant like you." Crixus sucked in his breath. "And what is that supposed to mean?" Mark's temper, already frayed, snapped. "I mean that you have been faithless to Spartacus for over two thousand years. If you'd let him take you over the Alps instead of staying to plunder Italy, even if you hadn't taken your Germans and Gauls off to the slaughter, leaving him without good men at the worst moment, who knows what he might have achieved? You could have spared six thousand men a slow death on the cross along the Appian Way. You could have had Rome! But no, you had to go your own way to Hell, and drag him along with you." He narrowed his eyes as a thought came to him. "Is that what you're doing now, Crixus? Either way, I'm screwed, is that it?" Despair filled him. If he killed Crixus now, Pierson would have to avenge the death of his lieutenant. He would come after Mark. And Mark no longer had the heart for that fight. "You're a dead man, Atticus," Crixus confirmed Mark's fear with a grin. "I'll take your head if I can, but if you kill me, Spartacus will come after you. He'll kill you, Atticus." "Maybe," Mark admitted. "Then again, if you win, maybe he'll kill you for disobeying him." Crixus snorted in disgust. "A graduate student in history and a comic book artist; how have the mighty fallen." He attacked. Mark parried the first blow, the second and the third. He ducked the fourth, and dodged the fifth, but it was only a temporary strategy. Crixus was taller than Mark, though not in as good shape. Though his sword was shorter than Mark's, it was also lighter and he really knew how to use it. He was too fast for Mark to fake him out or avoid him until he tired. Each of his blows was getting closer to its goal. "Dammit, Crixus!" Mark blocked a beheading swing and tried a disarming move that did not work. "Stop this!" "Fight, Roman!" Crixus shouted. He struck again. Mark didn't catch the move in time. Crixus' sword sliced into his side. In agony and fear, Mark struck out, one-handed, straight from the shoulder. He felt his sword connect with Crixus' neck, cutting through before he knew what was happening. Sword and headless body fell away separately. "Oh, Jesus," Atticus whispered. "I should have just stayed home." He would never know whether Crixus had made a mistake, or whether the Gaul had deliberately dropped his guard. As the first bolt of the Quickening hit, Atticus realised that either way, it didn't matter. ********* Don't you ever get lonely? Don't you ever get down? Don't you ever tired of all the wicked tongues in this town? I wish they'd stop hovering over me. It's bad enough when MacLeod gets it into his head that I'm manipulating him or Joe starts calling me a "calculating son of a bitch". That's unpleasant, but all I need do to get away from it is leave town. This...this worry, this fear of theirs is corrosive. It gets into my head like a bad cold and then *I* start believing that there's something wrong. At my age, I can't afford to start second-guessing myself. Even the short walk home exhausts me. I get in the door after fumbling with the keys at the lock for an infinite time. Ground in habit makes me close and lock the door behind me, shutting out the very last of the daylight. I don't know what gets my legs to carry me through to the bedroom, instead of just letting me lie down on the floor. After that, my battered old memory fails. BANG! BANG! BANG! "M. Pierson!" The first thing that I notice is not what wakes me up. There is a cat sitting on the pillow I've got jammed over my head. He is purring and drooling on me, kneading the pillow and my scalp, and he is damned heavy. "Silas," I grunt. "Get off my head." BANG! BANG! BANG! "M. PIERSON! Are you in there, M. Pierson?" Lots of neighborhood noise today. Knead, purr, drool. Knead, purr, drool. "Cat, get OFF!" "M. Pierson, it is the police! Open the door!" Pierson...Pierson.... Oh, Hell. That's me. Shoving off cat and pillow together, I sit up. What is the time? The time, I need the-- Sweet Heaven, I've slept for over twenty hours. My sword is still in my coat, from when I used it to kill that nameless brat yesterday morning. Though I wiped the blade clean, some blood always remains, along with the blood of a dozen others. I watch enough real life crime shows to know that, forensically speaking, the Ivanhoe is a murderer's nightmare. I drag myself out of bed. Lacking a better plan, I yank my sword out of my coat, sheath and all, and shove it under the covers. Hopefully, these people have merely come to talk, not search. I stumble out to the door, the cat whining about my feet, and open it. Standing in the doorway are two policemen. "Hullo?" I say. I don't have to try to sound confused. "M. Adam Pierson?" One of the policemen says, his expression flat. "Um...yes," I admit. "Can I help you?" "M. Pierson, do you know a man named Chris Mancuso?" He looks a bit like Joe--has that air of been there, done that, don't care to repeat it. Maybe that's why I feel as though I've seen him before. "He's a friend of mine." I say. What has the idiot done now? "Is he in some sort of trouble?" "I am very sorry to tell you, sir, that M. Mancuso is dead. His body was found in a parking lot a few streets from here." An electric shock shoots through my head down into my gut. The September sky behind the officers sharpens into diamond brightness. The officers, themselves, darken to silhouettes cut out of the sky. As they speak to me, their voices blur into a rising and falling hum. I feel sick, two thousand years of equilibrium knocked askew. Something nudges my ankles. I look down to see Silas circling my legs. Augh. I slept in my boots. They're still muddy from digging that hole. No wonder my feet itch. Silas meows. "M. Pierson?" the other officer says. "I have to feed the cat," I say. "M. Pierson, you need to come with us to identify the body." "Yes," I say. "After I feed the cat." "M. Pierson...." he says to my back. "Let him do it," the older one tells him. I shuffle into the kitchen and feed the cat, who immediately abandons my ankles for the food bowl. He purrs as he eats. I crouch down and stroke his fur. At least I've made somebody happy today. When I come out of the kitchen, the two policemen are waiting for me, still standing in the doorway. "Shall we go now, sir?" says the older one. I nod wearily. They both step aside to let me go out to the police car. At the station, they ask me questions. The policemen don't seem hostile or suspicious. When I answer them, I watch in mild disinterest as I seem to slip further and further down their list of suspects. Did Mancuso have any enemies? When did I last see him? What kind of mood was he in? I keep my answers vague. It helps that I hadn't seen Crixus in the eight years before he came back to town, and that I have no intention of turning in my main suspect. If I decide to do anything about Marcus Atticus, I'll take care of it myself. I'm of two minds about it. Atticus broke his agreement to stay out of Paris and now Crixus is dead. On the other hand, it's probably Crixus' own damned fault. If he challenged Atticus, he must have hoped that I'd take up the challenge to avenge him if he failed. I never liked Crixus' manipulations. I won't let them survive his death. If Atticus challenges me, that's different, but Atticus won't challenge me. He would have taken Crixus' mobile phone and called me, if he wanted a fight. He hasn't, and the mobile was found with Crixus. For now, I'm willing to call that a truce. After an hour, the policemen escort me down to the morgue. I don't like this place. I've awakened on a slab more than once, though not recently. Today, it's not my turn. When my time comes, I hope there will be no slab, no dissection, no chill humiliation. The worst thing about death, though, is that we no longer control what happens to our bodies. I can only hope that I'll be somewhere where I won't care. The policemen do try to be gentle, not that it helps. The coroner asks me if I'm ready. I say yes (I'm not). He pulls back the sheet, past the neck, where the separation between head and body is obvious. It looks like a clean cut, at least, a quick death, almost painless. Some Immortals hack heads the way a logger chops down trees. It is not a pleasant way to go. You're in agony, not quite dead, your Quickening leaking inexorably out.... "It's him." My voice is so flat, I don't recognise it. "This is Chris Mancuso?" Not exactly. "Yes." "You are certain?" "Yes." "Very well. Cover him back up, please." For a second before the coroner pulls the sheet back up, I think that they mean me, not Mancuso. The second policeman, the older one, shakes my hand. "Thank you for coming, M. Pierson. Again, we are very sorry for your loss." The words are shopworn, but the intent behind them is generous. "You have our deepest sympathies. You are now free to go." I blink at him. "That's it?" The policeman hesitates. "There is one more thing," he says slowly. "Did you once work with a man named Don Salzer?" I *knew* I should have switched IDs. What have I been thinking, playing at being Adam Pierson for so long? I should have moved on. "We used to work at Shakespeare & Company together," I say warily. "We were friends. I'm afraid he's been dead a long time." "He was murdered in 1995, yes? I remember that you testified against the man." "Yes, I did," I admit. "He tried to kill me, too. I'm only sorry that he didn't last longer in prison." What I'm really sorry about is that I didn't get to take Kalas' head myself. I made certain that the police found the body. I wanted that case closed. This man must have been part of the investigation. That's why he looks familiar. The policeman nods. "I understand," he says. "You must have wanted revenge very badly." I could beat around the bush. Then again.... "Wouldn't you?" I say. He smiles wryly. He has no evidence of my involvement, of course. "Officer," I continue. "I'm very, very tired. I just lost a good friend. I had to identify his body in your morgue. If you do have one more point, please get to it." "Your friend Mancuso had a tattoo on his left wrist," he admits. "A circle with lines through it. Your other friend, Don Salzer, had a similar tattoo. I wondered if you had noticed it." "No." I shake my head. "They were both very reserved, even with me. Neither of them liked to roll up his sleeves, if you know what I mean. Do you think that this has something to do with their deaths?" "It's possible that there was a link," he replies. "I would advise you to be very careful. You may know something that you do not realise could be useful to the investigation." *Or that you don't want to tell us,* he doesn't add. I hear the warning, anyway. "Thank you for your concern, officer," I tell him. "I think I'll be fine." He lets me go then. Sometimes, Adam Pierson can be useful. He's good at being disarming. It is one reason why I made him up. Maybe I didn't want to just play innocent for a few years, maybe I wanted to try being innocent. It didn't work very well, in the end. It only depressed me. Still, I had some fun. Don was a good friend. Joe is a good friend. MacLeod...I don't know what he is anymore. Leaving the police station, I see a familiar woman coming up the corridor from the entrance. It's Amy Thomas, Joe's daughter. When she sees me, she starts, but doesn't ignore me, or try to hurry past the way so many former Watcher friends do. Instead, she walks up and shakes my hand. "Hullo, Dr. Adams," she says, not loudly or to draw attention. "It's been a few years." I raise my eyebrows and she smirks. "A few, yes," I say. I lean close. "Keep your arms covered," I add quietly. Her eyes narrow, but she doesn't ask why. I take her by the elbow. "Let's go get a drink," I say. "Catch up on old times." "All right," she says, with no protest. Ah, she knows about Mancuso. Joe and MacLeod have been telling her tales, I see. This should be interesting. Amy wastes no time. No sooner have we stepped onto the sidewalk than she turns to me. "They brought you in about Chris Mancuso, didn't they?" she says, right to the point. "MacLeod told Joe he was an Immortal." "They wanted me to identify the body," I hedge. "It seems he'd lost his head." Her faces twists in sympathy. "I'm sorry, Ben. I understand that you were friends." "I suppose we were. They noticed the tattoo. One man asked me if there was a connection between Mancuso and Don Salzer." Her eyes widen. "He was one of the Watchers that Kalas murdered, wasn't he?" "Yes." Joe has kept her well informed, or maybe they lecture about Don's 'martyrdom' at the Academy now. "We'll have to watch out for them," she says, tugging her sleeve down over her tattooed wrist. "We don't want to arouse any suspicion with the police. Paris is too important a city to evacuate." She points down the sidewalk at her car. "Let me drive you home. You look like you've had quite a day." "No kidding. And I've only been up for two hours." I look her up and down. Short skirts look good on her. I put a hand on my hip and crook my elbow in invitation. "I thought we were going for a drink." She puts her arm through mine. "I think you'd fall asleep in it," she says. I suppose she's right. "I'll drive you home." ********* "Joe told you about Mancuso, did he?" I say as we near my apartment. Amy pushes her hair back from her forehead, looking embarrassed. "Well, no..." she admits. "I was there when he came in to see Joe the other day." "I see." So much for the patented Dawson damage control. I'll be lucky if half of Paris doesn't know my real name by the end of the week. "Did Joe tell you why he came?" Amy asks. "Did he show you the file?" "What file?" I feel cold. Crixus, you son of a bitch, what have been telling my friends? Amy looks as though she's regretting her slip. "Joe said he was going to tell you." No. Nonono. Crixus, you bastard. Tell me you didn't dig up what I think you dug up. I turn to face her. "He didn't tell me. What file?" Amy pulls into the parking lot to my apartment. My truck sits a few cars away. Amy brakes the car and turns off the ignition. She sits for a few minutes, in some sort of consideration. "What file, Amy?" I repeat. Amy sighs. "Mancuso had a file with him, from Seacouver. It had a police photo of you, attached to a psychiatric commitment order to the Seacouver County General Hospital." Oh. That file. "What was the date?" I say. "June 15, 1998." The date sounds about right. Not that I remember that month well. "Are you all right, Ben?" Amy asks, looking concerned. "Oh, sure. Absolutely. It was years ago. I'm completely over...anything, everything. I don't know." I lean forward and bang my head gently on the dashboard. Deep breaths, here, Old Man. I mean, what the Hell. MacLeod's had at least two breakdowns since I've known him (even if he thinks that a Dark Quickening and battling the forces of Ahri-what's-his-name don't count). What're a few straitjackets between friends? Okay. So, I had a few bad months back in 1997 and '98. A few really, really bad months. A few 'somebody take my head, please, to spare me the effort of getting up in the morning' months, to be exact. It's not that big a deal. Happens to me at least once every century or two. It's not the worst that I've ever been. That breakdown only cost, oh, one thousand years or so of my humanity, and at least ten thousand lives. Amy puts a tentative hand on my shoulder. "Um, Ben. I know that this has all been a shock to you, but maybe you should try to get some rest. It can't hurt. You could go stay with Duncan MacLeod for a few days until you get your balance back. Joe's explained the situation to him." "Has he." This is bad. Obviously, Joe and MacLeod think I've gone off my head, and they've recruited Amy as the shepherd to bring me back into the fold (and here I thought Joe loved his daughter). I can see where this is going. Amy will drive me over to MacLeod's, where a few days will turn into a few weeks, maybe even a few months or years. MacLeod will shadow me constantly, like some home care nurse. Eventually, he'll grow tired and impatient. Then, he'll pass me on to the next starry-eyed Immortal as if I'm one of his precious antiques. I should be grateful it won't be Richie. Worse yet, Joe might persuade the Watchers to take me back in. Maybe they'll try to lock me up in Sanctuary, safely tucked away in some virtual reality. How dare they? Do they think that I'll like being put away any better because it's my friends doing it? Wasn't it bad enough, waking up in that Seacouver hospital among strangers, with no idea what I'd done the previous week? Thank Heaven I'd recovered enough sense at that point to play it meek until the staff turned their backs. That was hardly my first jailbreak! It's no great task to fool strangers. My so-called friends, now, that's a different story. Joe and MacLeod know too many of my tricks. They'll both watch me like jackals in the grass, damn their eyes. And look! Joe has already recruited the next generation of Dawsons to the task. Amy may be young, and still stupid, but she's got her father's blood in her. I'll need to shake her off my track as soon as I can, or she'll have my treacherous old carcass in the trap by day's end. What all my well-wishers need is a good scare. MacLeod first, I think. It's time he stopped putting me in the category of 'women, children and doddering Ancients', and started taking me seriously as a fellow killer. I don't like to make any more enemies than I have already got, but I'm not going to let him and his pet Watcher put me in a cage. If there truly were something worse than death, then looking at life through a set of padded bars would qualify for me. I don't do well in captivity. I'll admit to many failings, but never to that one. Too many would be willing to try to prove me wrong. MacLeod, for one. The first thing I need to do is pass on some information--from Amy's lips to Joe's ears. I lift my head and smile at her. She smiles back tentatively, not sure what's going on. Good. Very good. "Thank you for the ride, Amy," I chirp, which is hard with my voice register. "It was lovely of you to offer. I really do appreciate it." The look on Amy's face as I open the car door and get out is worth the invention of the Polaroid camera. "But--but...don't you want me to drive you over to the barge?" "Oh, no." I smile, showing my teeth. In past millennia, I sometimes filed my canines down to points. They always grew back. "I have to get my sword first. Don't worry. Just tell him I'll be along presently." I back away from the car, projecting enough psychotic cheer to make certain Amy knows that my trip to the barge will not be a social visit. Then, I turn and head into the building. Behind me, I hear Amy grind her starter in her haste to get the car going. She peels out of the parking lot, headed for Le Blues Bar, I presume. Poor kid. I'll make it up to her later--once I've established the ground rules with all of my potential nannies. Crixus is lucky he's dead. If he weren't, I'd kill him myself. *********