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    Rick arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early, guided from the parking lot by tiki torches whose flames blazed defiantly at the eternal Seacouver rain.  He shook off his umbrella and wiped his feet on the mat, but surprised the restaurant hostess by refusing to hand her his raincoat.

    “No thanks,” he said with a smile.  “It’s like a part of me, you know?”  The hostess raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.  He wandered into the lounge and grabbed a table near the central firepit, signaling the waitress for a drink.

    She came over to his table, grass skirt swaying as she moved.  Rick liked her dark looks, and appreciated the way her blouse was tied above her belly button, letting everybody who cared to look know that she was an outie.  He also noticed that the waitress was braless, no doubt in keeping with the polynesian theme of the restaurant.

    “They’re artificial, you know?” she said, raising her voice to compete with the island drums coming from the ceiling speakers.

    “What’s artificial?” he asked.  “The grass skirt, the orchid in your hair, or ... other things?”

    “No, silly,” she replied.  “The logs are artificial.  It’s a fake bonfire, you know.  Fake logs and a gas-fed flame.  It just looks like a real bonfire.”  She gave him a wink.  “Everything else is as real as it gets.”

    “Oh.  Umm ... great.  Terrific.”  Wish I was as smooth with women as Mac was, he thought.  Even when I’m 400 years old, I’m still gonna feel awkward.
 
    “You want a drink, sweetie?” she asked.  “What’ll it be?  Wanna try ‘Sex on the Beach’?  It’s our specialty, you know.”  She winked again.  Rick felt his face flush.

    He started to reply, then heard from over his shoulder, “No, thank you.  We’ll be having our drinks served at our table.  By our waiter, I presume.”

    Rick hurriedly rose to his feet as the waitress shrugged and turned away to greet another customer.   He caught his breath as he saw Michelle.  Her blonde hair was worn up and encircled her head like a crown.  Her emerald earrings matched her eyes as well as the gem around her graceful neck.  And her velvet dress, the color of chocolate, modestly showed-off a figure of classic proportions.  Rick forgot the waitress, forgot his suspicions--and forgot his sword, which clanged loudly against the chair as he tried to take her gloved hand in greeting.

    Fortunately, she laughed.  “Is that your sword, or are you just happy to see me?”

    “Michelle.  You look ... great.”  Yeah--Mr. Smooth, all right, he thought.  Think, Richie!  What would Mac say?  He gestured at the raincoat.  “Occupational hazard, you know.  It’s like being on-call twenty-four seven.”

    “And is this how you spend your time, flirting with the local island maids?”

    “Just killing time ‘til you showed-up.”  He managed to take her arm with what he hoped was some semblance of suavoir faire.  “And now that you’re here, shall we find our table?”

    “Yes, please, Mr. Ryback,” Michelle replied. “Let’s make our escape before your waitress finds an excuse to spill some kind of exotic flaming drink on my dress.”

    Rick smiled.  “At least, that would give me an excuse to, um, pat you down.”

    Michelle smiled back at him as they left the lounge.  In a low voice, meant for his ears only, she said, “You don’t need to go to that extreme.  Just give me a couple of those rum drinks, and I’ll probably start smoldering on my own.”

*****

    Despite all Mac and Tessa had done for him, Rick reflected, they had seriously neglected to impart any in-depth knowledge of fine wine.  He doubted that Heineken went very well with Alaskan halibut, regardless of whether mango salsa was served on the side.  He glanced up at the waiter, who was unsuccessfully hiding his impatience at Rick’s confusion behind a false smile.

    “I have a confession, Michelle,” he began.  “I’m no good with wines.”  He showed her the eight-page wine list.  “I honestly don’t know the difference between a Riesling, a Gewurtstraminer, or a Chardonnay.  And even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to order with our fish.  Would you mind doing the honors?”

    The waiter decided that Rick had taken long enough.  “May I suggest --” he began.

    “You may not,” Rick cut him off.  “The lady will choose for us.”  And so saying, he handed Michelle the list.  He didn’t miss the waiter’s rolling of the eyes.  There goes your tip, buddy, he thought.

    “The Puligny-Montrachet ‘Demoiselles’, I believe,” she said after a minute’s study.  “A ‘96, if you have it.  If not, the ‘97.”

    “Very good, madam.”

    Rick didn’t have the faintest idea what she’d ordered, but it obviously impressed the waiter.  He liked the way the guy involuntarily licked his lips, as if he was dying for a taste himself.  Rick vowed that there wouldn’t be a single drop left in the bottle after they were done.

    When the wine came and was poured, he liked what he tasted.  The wine was silky and full-bodied, but with a tart crispness that kept it from being overpowering.  He nodded at Michelle as he raised the glass in a toast.  “Shall we toast to--” he started to say.

    “To life!” Michelle finished.  “To a very, very long life!”  And with that, she gulped down a swallow and set her glass down on the table so hard that the wine spilled down the sides.

    That wasn’t the reaction to the wine that Rick had been expecting.  As he mopped up the spill with his napkin, he asked, “Hey, Michelle ... ma belle.  You okay over there?”

    Michelle sniffed back some tears but replied, “No, no.  I am fine.  Really.  It’s just that my father isn’t well, you see--and it’s hard for me to sit here with you knowing that someday soon he won’t be with me anymore.”

    “Yeah,” Rick said.  “I’ve lost loved ones, too.”  He thought of Tessa, dead by a junkie’s bullet.  “It’s not easy to go on.  But we do, don’t we?  We go on and all we have left are the memories and the feelings.”

    She looked at him, and for the first time he saw bitterness in her eyes.  “And some of us go on longer than others, yes?  Some fall by the wayside after seventy or eighty or a hundred years--while others keep on going forever.  Life is short, and the years are long--but for some the life is very long indeed!”  She took another big gulp of the wine.  At this rate, he thought, we’re going to need a second bottle real soon.

    Apparently, his attempt to comfort her wasn’t working as well as he’d hoped.  Time to change the subject, Richie, he said to himself.

    “So,” he said brightly, as the waiter served the halibut.  “How did you ever get involved with the Watchers, anyway?”  He took a bite; it was just as delicious as he remembered.

    Michelle looked straight into his eyes and said evenly, “It was my father who first told me about immortals, Rick.”

    Oh great, Rick thought, now we’re back to her father again.  “Is he a Watcher, too?”

    “No,” she said.  “He was a Senior Inspector, assigned to the Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office in Paris.  Last year he retired because of the cancer.  My father was not a Watcher; he learned about immortals by encountering them during a murder investigation.”  Michelle drank some more wine.  Rick was relieved to note that she took a more moderate sip this time.  “He kept his thoughts to himself, of course.   He didn’t want to lose his job over some wild accusations about people who lived forever and who went around chopping-off heads.  Can you imagine the official reaction to that report?  He would have been lucky to avoid a long vacation in a psychiatric hospital.”

    Now Rick was puzzled.  “So he’s not a Watcher; he’s a cop.  Okay.  So how does that lead to you and the Watchers?”

    “It was like ‘The X-Files’, you see.  Over the past few years, he had any report that involved a beheading routed to his office for review.  Gradually, a pattern began to emerge, and it just got bigger and bigger.  The same names kept coming up over and over again, and some of the names were found in files dating back to Napoleon’s time!  Either it was all an incredible coincidence ... or something else was at work.  He began to compile his own files on those persons he believed were somehow involved, and that included some surveillance and, uh, perhaps some not-so-legal surveillance, if you know what I mean.  That’s how he learned of another group who was also watching the immortals, and how he learned about some of the Rules of The Game.”
 
    Rick said,  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight.  Your father learned about the immortals and the Watchers, and told you about them, right?”  Michelle nodded.  “So how did you actually get into the Watchers?  Did they recruit you in college, or something?”

    “No,” Michelle replied.  “It was I who contacted them.  I found that Watching immortals was more interesting than my studies.  It was the difference between reading about history, and watching it come alive, if you know what I’m saying.”

    “Yeah, I think I do,” Rick said.  “I used to feel that way when I was living with Tessa and Duncan, before--”

    “Before you became an immortal yourself,” Michelle said flatly.
 
    “Yeah.  Before then.”

    Rick could feel the conversation die.  There was an awkward pause while they both searched for something to say.  He looked down at the remains of the fish, surrounded by reddish-orange sauce, then over to the now-empty wine glass.  He cleared his throat.

    “Tell me about--” “What was it like--?” they both spoke at once, and laughed.

    “You first,” Rick said.

    “Well, I was just wondering--” Michelle began, “what was it like to find out that you’re immortal?  I mean, you think you’re dying and you actually do die--and then you wake up again, is that not correct?  So, how did that feel?”

    “Michelle, it hurts to die.  Mortal or immortal, the pain is the exactly same.  The night I was shot, I experienced the same pain, the same shock--the same denial and regret--everything exactly the same as any other person would have felt.  It hurt a lot, and then it all slowly went black ...  it was like a falling down a well in slow-motion.  And the darker it got, the less it hurt, you know?  So everything finally went black and the pain went away--and then I woke up and saw Mac, tears streaming down his face as he held Tessa in his arms.”  Rick shook his head at the painful memory.  “Michelle, when I woke up, I was exactly the same person who had died.  Same ol’ Richie Ryan:  same thoughts, same memories.  I didn’t feel the slightest bit different, not at all.  I went to sleep, and then I woke up.  No big deal.  But you know, even though it was like waking from a dream--it was more like waking-up into a nightmare.  The new Richie Ryan had to learn how to use a sword, because there were others out there who would be coming after him, whether he wanted to fight them or not.”

    He suddenly looked up as the waiter made his presence felt.  “Some more water, please.”  He took a greedy gulp to kill the taste of ashes in his mouth.

    “So that’s my story.  Mortal one day; immortal the next--with all the fun of living forever, unless some thousand year-old creep comes along and whacks-off my head.”  Rick took a deep breath.  “Sooo ... you were saying that you contacted the Watchers and got accepted into their training program.  That was two years ago.  What’ve you been doing since then?”

    Michelle twirled her glass, blushing.  “Research,” she said.  “I have been doing statistical analyses of the Watcher records.  Actually, this is my first time into the field--at least, the first time since I worked with my father.”

    Ahhh, Rick thought, that’s why she reacted to the cut the way she did.  Despite her knowledge and age, she’s really just a newbie Watcher when it comes to actually dealing with real live immortals.  Rick idly wondered about the percentage of Watchers who actually interacted with immortals, as opposed to reading or researching about them.  The field operatives might actually be in the minority of the organization.

    Rick didn’t press the issue, making small talk until the bill came.  Before Rick could reach for his wallet, Michelle had already dropped some bills on the table.  “I enjoyed the dinner and the conversation, but now let us go for a walk,” she said,  “Let’s get out of here and smell the ocean as we feel the rain on our faces.”

    They left the table and the tiki torches behind, as they walked hand in hand through the misty drizzle that filled the Seacouver night.

*****

    “It’s about immortals,” Michelle was saying. “There’s a statistical pattern in the movements of the immortals that shows up in the data.  But the current population of immortals doesn’t fit with any pattern.  Everything is normal, and then suddenly the population changes dramatically.  It’s a sudden population shift, like a mass migration.  Only there is nowhere to migrate.”

    The streetlights periodically lit the mist with fuzzy halos and then returned them both into shadow as they strolled along the dockside.  Rick liked the feel of her hand in his; he liked the warmth and the softness of a hand that had never held a sword.  “Are you saying that we’re like lemmings, following each other off a cliff or something?”

    “Not really.  It’s more like a force of nature.  Technically, it’s called a ‘non-periodic regularity’ or a ‘strange attractor’--those are terms of chaos theory.  You’ve heard of chaos theory, have you not?”

    “Chaos?  Oh yeah.  That’s been a specialty of mine for years.  Tends to get me into trouble, too.”

    “Please be serious, Rick!” Michelle said.  “It has been proven for years that the chaotic forces of nature can be analyzed in statistical terms, and that things we thought were purely random events were in actuality constrained within certain parameters--that there was in fact a type of order within the randomness.  One of the main areas to which chaos theory applies is population dynamics.”

    “Okay, okay.  So you’re saying that you applied your chaos theory to the population of immortals?  How did that work, anyway?  Did you do a census, or something like that?”

    “Have you ever wondered about immortals?  I mean--of course you have!  But have you ever wondered if there were only a certain number of immortals allowed to walk the earth at any given time?  Or if as an immortal lost his or her head, then another was allowed to be born?  What if the total population of immortals was random, but always fluctuated within certain parameters, as if the total number of immortals--or maybe the total energy of their Quickenings, taken together--was a ‘strange attractor’ around which the actual population number fluctuated on a seemingly random basis?  That’s what I was looking for.”

    Rick tried to understand.  It wasn’t easy, given that his formal schooling had ended in his junior year of high school.  “So you analyzed the population numbers from the various Watcher Chronicles, and noticed that they stayed pretty much the same?  If that’s true, then how can there be ‘only one’ at the end, the one who wins The Prize?”

    “No, Rick--you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

    Rick took a deep breath.  “Okay.  Then try it in words of one syllable or less.”

    “Chaos analyses of population dynamics show that there are generally three population scenarios, okay?”  Richie nodded.  “The first scenario is when the seed is too small--when there’s not enough population at the beginning.  In that case the population moves to extinction.”

    Rickie nodded again.  “Too small means extinction,” he said.

    “Good,” Michelle smiled.  “Now the next scenario is when the starting population is a little bigger, say maybe thirty to fifty percent more than the first scenario.  In that case the population grows by leaps and bounds until it’s too high, then it dies off a bit, then grows, then dies off, et cetera.  That’s called an equilibrium state, also known as sustainable growth--when the population starts at the right number and then follows a regular pattern within bounds that can be predicted.”

    “Okay.  You’re saying that the population of immortals is, um, sustainable, right?  Like there’s too many, and then we kill each other, and then there’s more again.”

    “No, Rick,” Michelle shook her head.  “The population of immortals follows the third scenario, the chaotic one.”

    “How’s that one go?”

    “The chaotic scenario is when the starting population is much bigger, say three or four times the population in the second scenario.  There’s aging and death and new births all happening on a random basis, yet the random population points can be plotted--and the resulting pattern displays a startling order!”  Michelle stopped and grabbed Rick by both shoulders, looking into his eyes for emphasis.  “The pattern is basically two endless loops, set next to each other like butterfly wings.  It’s like the random population hovers around two central points, on one side growing and on the other shrinking--and the shrinking scenario is what I think leads to the Gathering.”

    Rick shook his head, trying to understand.  “So you think you can predict the onset of the Gathering based on a pattern in the population of immortals?  Now that sounds like witchcraft to me.”

    “Almost correct, Rick,” Michelle replied.  “In theory, each point is entirely random, so I can’t actually predict future population trends.  But I can plot the various points and show where we are today--right now--in terms of the Gathering.”

    “Okay.  I’ll bite,” Rick said, “I still don’t understand what the heck you’re talking about--but I’ll bite.  Where are we today?”

    “Rick, we are at the lowest population point ever charted.  If the Gathering is not happening right this minute, it will be soon.”  Michelle took a deep breath.  “And none of the Watcher reports show the number of beheadings necessary to bring the population this low.  It’s like more than two hundred immortals suddenly left the earth with no Quickenings and no report as to where they went.”

    “Great.  The Watchers lost track of two hundred immortals, and suddenly your pattern goes haywire.  What does this have to do with me, exactly?”

    “All of the disappearances started in June, 1999.  Right after Duncan MacLeod disappeared.  He was the first one that we lost.”

    “Well, I haven’t seen him.”

    “Right.  I understand that.  It’s just that, well, we had you listed among the missing as well.  Not exactly missing but, um, among the officially dead.  No offense meant!  And then somebody thought to check out MacLeod’s old haunts on the off-chance that he would be there.  They checked the dojo and the old antique shop.  They didn’t find MacLeod, but they found you there instead.”

    “Great.”  Rick made a face.  “It’s always nice to meet old friends.”

    “So now I have told you why we need your help.  We have to find MacLeod so that we can understand what is happening to the immortals.  And if the Gathering is upon us, then the Watchers must be there as well, to observe and record.”

    “Look, Michelle,” Rick said.  “If the Gathering is here, I haven’t heard anything about it.  No engraved invitations; no tux rentals.  Are you sure that your chaos theory proves that this is the time of the Gathering?”

    “No,” she replied.  “But even if there is no Gathering, we still can’t explain what happened to more than two hundred immortals, who apparently just vanished out of our sight.  We need to find them, and to do that we need to find Duncan MacLeod!  You know MacLeod better than any living soul, and you must help us find him!”

    “Michelle.  Listen.  I.  Do not.  Know.  Where.  Mac is.  I do not know where the other immortals are.  In fact, I haven’t seen another immortal for nearly two years!  You’re fishing off the wrong pier, sister.”

    “I think not, Rick,” she said.  “You managed to elude the Watchers for nearly two years.  How you accomplished that illusion might give us some insight into how the other immortals are disappearing from our sight.”

    They arrived back at Rick’s car.  Rick couldn’t help noticing that the tiki torches had been extinguished, and the parking lot was now dark and deserted.  He looked around, but couldn’t catch sight of Michelle’s car.  He smiled wryly.  Looks like I get to give the young lady a ride home.

    “So now I have told you everything, and asked for your help.  Will you not now tell me how you eluded the Watchers and fooled everyone into thinking that MacLeod took your head?”

    Rick looked around at the now-quiet torches, and at the fishing trawlers docked at the pier.  He looked at the stars peeking through the clouds, and down at the streetlights reflected in the puddles at his feet.  It was in the puddle that he caught sight of his face, and his memory carried him back to Paris, nearly two years ago....

*****

    Richie tried not to panic as he rushed into the old racetrack, searching for the kidnappers who had taken Joe.  Horton is alive!  The thought kept echoing in his brain along with the sounds of his racing footsteps and the pounding of his heart.  Mac was right after all--Horton’s back and now he has Joe!  Richie had seen the car drive away, Joe in the passenger seat and Horton with a gun to Joe’s head, and he had followed them back to the dark and deserted track, a modern Colisseum of cold concrete and labyrinthian passageways, knowing that there wasn’t time to wait for Mac and Methos to show-up.  It was up to him to rescue Joe and put a final end to Horton and his band of renegade Watchers.

    His sword was in his hand as he ran up the escalator, searching for any signs of the kidnappers.  Nothing.  There was only silence and darkness and the vague outlines of trashpiles as he swept around the track.  Where were the Watchers?

    Someone struck a match, lighting a cigarette--the flame was visible from where Richie stood, halfway across the track, but on the same level.  He headed that way.  He was almost there when he sensed the presence of another immortal.

    Can’t be Mac--it’s way too soon.  Who else could it be?  He was prepared to take on the Watchers and their leader, Horton, but the presence of another immortal confused matters.  Better slow down and think about this one.

    It was at that moment that the net fell from the darkness above, knocking him to the floor and trapping his sword.  Before he could cut himself loose, somebody walked around the corner, and turned on the lights.  It was an immortal.  The guy was about five-eight or -nine, maybe one-fifty or so, with dark hair and eyes and a big bushy mustache.  It wasn’t Horton; it wasn’t anybody he’d ever seen before.  But the guy clearly knew what he was up to, as he walked over and put his foot on Richie’s sword, pinning it to the ground.

    “What d’you want?  Where’s Joe?” Richie said.  But the stranger didn’t reply as he smoothly took out a gun from under his jacket and put two shots into Richie’s chest.  Richie tried to do something--anything--but the world started spinning and the blood rushed into his head, and the last thing Richie remembered was the scar across the guy’s neck as he leaned his head back and laughed without making a sound.

*****