Evil Star

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. ..."

    ************************************
    Half an hour later, Susan Ashwood received a tele-phone call at her home in Manchester, England. It was Fabian, calling from Lima.
    "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