Evil Star (21 page)

The second hotel was the same. At the third, Matt went in and tried to book a room, speaking in English. The owner stared at him in something close to shock — and he could understand why. The language he was speaking sim-ply didn't fit in with his appearance and was drawing too much attention to himself. He had no need to remind himself that the police were looking for him. The fact
that Captain Rodriguez had been at the hacienda proved that he was in the pay of Diego Salamanda — if any more proof were needed. Matt had no papers, no identity. If the police got their hands on him a second time, he would dis-appear for good. He backed away quickly from the receptionist, knowing he couldn't stay.

By now it was late morning. Matt was thirsty, hungry, and exhausted. He could feel the lack of oxygen in the air. Every time he exerted himself, he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath.

How high up were they? On the bus, it felt as if they had been climbing for hours.

He looked at Pedro. "Do you want to eat?"

Pedro nodded.
"Estoy muerto de hambre."

They chose the shabbiest, quietest restaurant they could find, but even so, the owner refused to serve them until they had paid. Once he had their money and knew they wouldn't run away, he took pity on them and served a huge meal of
chicharrones
— chunks of deep-fried pork ribs — and a jug of
chicha,
which tasted sweet and fruity and was some sort of ancient Inca beer.

Matt and Pedro ate in silence. They had no choice. But even so Matt was beginning to feel closer to the other boy — as if the two of them had known each other all their lives and really had no need to talk. A Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star few other tourists came in, but they paid no attention to them, and Matt was able to relax and collect his thoughts.

One of the travelers at the next table was reading a Spanish newspaper. He turned a page, and at that moment everything changed. Pedro nudged him and pointed. Matt turned and saw a photograph of himself—taken by Richard in the middle of York.

Matt jolted upright in his chair when he saw the white skin, the neat hair, the smiling face. The picture belonged to another time, another world. He could hardly believe it was him.

And then came the fear. Had the Peruvian police pub-lished the photograph to try to track him down? How had they gotten it? He didn't want to draw attention to himself, but he had to know what the newspaper said. He leaned forward. And there it was: a message from the Nexus.

MATT FREEMAN

CONTACT US FOR HELP. CALL US AT ANYTIME.

There was a telephone number printed below.

So someone had finally realized he was missing and had taken steps to find him! But could he trust it? Salamanda owned newspapers.

Could he have placed the message there as a trap? Matt quickly read it again. They had called him Matt, not Matthew. That was something. Salamanda wouldn't have known that was the name he preferred. It wasn't much to go on, but Matt realized he had nothing to lose. He would call the number and see what happened next.

He memorized it quickly before the traveler turned the page. The Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star table had a paper tablecloth and he wrote it down in tomato sauce, using a toothpick. As soon as they had finished eating, he tore out the number and hurried into the street.

"We need to find a telephone," he told Pedro.

"Si. . . un téléfono.
"Pedro was the one who had seen the photograph. He knew what was going on.

Just about every hotel and cafe in Cuzco had telephone and Internet facilities. Matt went into the first one he found, threw down some money and made his demand in English. He wasn't worrying about his safety anymore. He was shown into a creaky wooden cabinet where he took out the scrap of torn paper and dialed the number.

There was a pause, a dial tone, then . . .

"Matthew? Is that you?" It was Fabian speaking. He sounded exhausted and excited at the same time, and it occurred to Matt that this was a dedicated telephone line. Fabian must have been sitting beside the receiver, waiting for the call.

"Mr. Fabian . . . ?"

"Where are you? How are you? Are you all right. . . ?" .

“Yeah. I'm fine."

"I can't believe it's you. We've all been so worried about you. I nearly went crazy when you and Richard didn't show up in Lima.

Then Alberto told me what happened. Is Richard with you?"

"No. He's not." Matt felt a sense of relief just talking to Fabian, hearing his voice once again. "I'm okay. But I need your help."

"Of course. We've been waiting for you to ring. You don't need to worry about anything now, Matt. You just need to tell me where you are and how I can reach you."

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

"I'm in Cuzco."

"Cuzco!" Fabian sounded astonished. "What are you doing there?"

"It's a long story."

"Tell me. And as soon as I put this phone down, I'm on my way. ..."

************************************

"I've spoken to Matthew," he told her. "You won't believe the things that have been happening to him but he's alive and he's all right. He's in Cuzco. Don't ask me how he got there. It's too long a story. But I've already booked a flight and I'll be there this evening. I'm going to bring him in. And there's wonderful news — another one of the five. . ."

The two of them spoke for some time as Fabian filled her in on what Matt had told him. Then he rang off, and Susan Ashwood telephoned Natalie Johnson to pass on the news.

"Matthew is in Cuzco," she said. "He saw the advertise-ments and telephoned Fabian. . . ."

The two women spoke for about ten minutes.

Shortly after that, Diego Salamanda received a call at his hacienda near lea. He barely spoke at all, holding the receiver against his ear.

The mouthpiece, of course, came nowhere near his mouth. When he did want to talk, he had to slide the receiver down his face.

Eventually, he smiled and hung up. The caller had told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

Now he knew where Matt was, too.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

Chapter 13 Into Thin Air

The next available flight from Lima didn't get in until nine o'clock.

Fabian had arranged to meet Matt and Pedro one hour after that, in front of the cathedral in the main square. That gave them the rest of the day to kill until he arrived.

They spent the time walking around Cuzco, trying to keep out of everyone's way. It was a weird experience for Matt. Normally, someone like him would only come here as a tourist — and if he had been dressed differently, that was what people would think he was.

He could imagine himself stopping to photograph the long galleries with their stone archways and the bustling shops behind.

But his disguise had put him right at the heart of the city. He had become part of it. At one point, as he and Pedro sat on a step outside a museum, he even found him-self being photographed by two Americans. For reasons he couldn't quite understand, he was annoyed to see the expen-sive zoom lens being focused on him.

Before the camera had clicked, he sprang to his feet.

"Why don't you take a picture of someone else?" he snapped at the astonished couple. He knew he wasn't being fair, but he still felt a brief sense of victory as the man and his wife backed away, confused.

Later that afternoon, he and Pedro came upon the tem-ple of Coricancha. In fact, they could hardly have missed it. It was a major tourist attraction, located in the southern part of the city and Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star surrounded by coach buses with a non-stop flow of visitors around the main entrance. Once again there were Inca walls — with a terrace high above, giving panoramic views over the city. There was also a Spanish church on the site. In fact, it had been constructed over it — one building on top of another — as if it had been dropped there from outer space. Why had Micos sent them here? There didn't seem to be any reason, and Matt wasn't prepared to waste any of their money paying to get in.

Even so, he lingered around the entrance and listened as the tour organizers delivered the same lecture to each group of tourists.

Coricancha was the ancient word for "golden courtyard." There had once been a great temple with four thousand priests living here.

Every wall had been lined with solid plates of gold, and the rooms had been filled with statues and altars .. . also gold. It had been used by the Incas as a religious center and a celestial observatory. Then the conquistadors had come and taken everything. They had melted down the gold, ripped out the altars, and built their own church on the ruins that remained.

Would Fabian bring them here on Friday night? Matt wondered.

Was there a chance that Richard might turn up? A guard walked out of the entrance and gestured at Matt and Pedro to move away. Pedro muttered something ugly and guttural in Spanish and tugged at Matt's sleeve. Matt understood. The guard thought they were trying to beg from the tourists. They had no place here. Poor people in Cuzco really had no place anywhere.

As the evening drew in, they walked back to the square and sat on the long step between the cathedral and the fountain. Matt wondered what Pedro was thinking about. He had tried to explain that Fabian was coming, but he wasn't sure how much the other boy had Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star understood. Pedro didn't look happy to him — but then, he hardly ever did. Matt knew how he felt. He had never asked for any of this.

He was completely out of his depth. Pedro probably wished he was back in Lima and that the two of them had never met.

At last, the darkness came, and with it Cuzco was trans-formed into something almost magical. Matt had noticed how strange the light was by day. At night, the sky became a luminous blue with the mountains stretching out, deep black, below. Thousands of orange lights sparkled in the outlying suburbs, and streetlamps glowed all around in the square. After the heat of the day, the evening was cool.

The restaurants were filling up, the pavements packed with peo-ple in no hurry to go anywhere, like extras on some huge open-air stage.

The police car entered the square just after nine o'clock. Matt noticed it first — a low, white vehicle with a yellow-and-blue stripe and a strip light mounted on the roof. There were two men inside.

He watched the car as it cruised slowly along the far side and parked in front of one of the money change shops. The two men didn't get out.

He thought nothing of it. There were police everywhere in Cuzco, just as there had been in Lima. It seemed that their main job was to keep the tourists happy. Tourists were worth millions to the Peruvian economy. They had to feel safe.

But then a second police car joined the first, and Matt began to grow uneasy. They couldn't be looking for him! Apart from Fabian, nobody knew he and Pedro were there. Pedro nudged him, glancing in the direction of the second car. The expression on his face was clear: The police in this country were bad news. The two of them had been moved on plenty of times throughout the day and Matt had no doubt that he and Pedro could be arrested just for sitting here.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star What was the time? Surely it must be getting close to ten o'clock?

He wished Pedro hadn't stolen his watch.

The two police cars and more policemen on foot were entering the square from all sides, moving slowly, seem-ingly with no particular purpose. What was going on? Pedro was becoming more and more agitated. There was some-thing animal about him now. His eyes were wide and alert. Every muscle in his body seemed to be locked.

He was sens-ing danger, even if he hadn't seen it yet.

"I think we should move," Matt said.
"Vamos!"

He didn't want to go. Fabian would arrive any minute now. If he could wait just a few minutes longer, the whole ordeal might be over. Getting up, walking, might draw attention to himself. Every fiber of his being screamed at him to stay where he was. While he was sitting down, unno-ticed, he was safe. But at the same time, there were more than a dozen policemen in the square now, fanning out, all of them armed. Had the police come by coincidence or did they know Matt was here? Was this just another raid, or were they looking for him?

The question was answered in an instant as the passenger door of one of the police cars opened and a man got out. It was Captain Rodriguez. He was standing directly under a streetlamp, which cast a glow across his face with its rough, pitted skin and heavy moustache. He looked like a boxer stepping into the ring, and as his eyes swung across the square, Matt knew without any doubt at all that his tele-phone call to Fabian had been intercepted and that he had walked straight into another trap.

He stood up, forcing himself not to panic. Rodriguez hadn't seen him since the Hotel Europa and didn't know what he looked like now that he was in disguise. There were still plenty of people around.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star The two of them could just walk away, mingling with the crowd.

Pedro dug his hand into his trouser pocket. When he brought it out, he was holding his rubber slingshot. Matt shook his head.

"Not now, Pedro," he said. "There are too many of them."

Pedro frowned, then seemed to understand. He put the slingshot away again.

The scream of a whistle cut through the air.

It was as if someone had thrown a switch. Suddenly, all the policemen were running toward them as if they had known where they were all along and had simply been play-ing a game. Another car cut in from behind. Rodriguez was pointing directly at them and shouting. Tourists and travel-ers stood gaping, afraid, finding themselves caught up in the middle of something they didn't want to see. The friendly face of the country they had come to visit had slipped to reveal the brutality beneath. There were armed police everywhere.