Evil Star

tell them his name. Matt assumed that there must be another exit from the tunnel, some other way to bring the mules into the open air. Ahead of them was another narrow staircase and a lever set in the wall. Atoc raised a finger to his lips and pulled the lever. Matt heard a slight creaking, the turning of a wheel, and guessed that a mechanism like the one that had opened the first wall was being used.
    Atoc waited a moment, listening. Somebody whistled, two single notes that sounded like a bird. At once, he relaxed. "We can go up,"
    he said, then repeated it in Spanish for Pedro.
    They began to climb. Matt could see a circle ahead of him, lit by a white light that seemed to hang in the far dis-tance. Some sort of tattered curtain hung down. It was only as he passed through that he realized this was the mouth of a cave, surrounded by foliage. The light was a full moon. Matt walked back out into the open, on a hillside high above Cuzco, with two more Indians in ponchos bowing at him.
    Pedro joined him and they saluted him, too. Then Atoc appeared.
    Matt looked back. There was a round hole in the ground, the entrance to the cave. But it was only a couple of meters deep, with a solid back wall. The steps had disap-peared. Matt realized that the lever must have been pulled a second time and some sort of huge boulder had rolled into place. The exit from the tunnel was as Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star impossible to find as the entrance.
    The two Indians gestured and he followed them away from the edge of the hill and into what looked like the ruin of an ancient stadium, a theater, a fortress ... or perhaps a mix of all three. There was a flat area, roughly circular, covered by grass and surrounded by gigantic boulders that had been arranged in a zigzagging line. There were three levels to the stadium, so whatever activity had once taken place in the circle could have been witnessed by thousands of people, standing or sitting above. The place was lit by floodlights and there were still twenty or thirty tourists wan-dering through the ruins. Nobody took any notice of Matt, Pedro, and Atoc. They had come out of nowhere, but Atoc had made sure nobody had seen them arrive.
    "This . .. Sacsayhuaman," he told Matt. "Sacsayhuaman means
    'Royal Eagle' and this place was a great fortress until the Spanish came. You see the throne of the Inca!" He pointed to the rough shape of a seat that had actually been cut into the rock on the opposite side. There was a girl in a fleece jacket sitting there, having her photograph taken. Atoc frowned in distaste. "Now we leave," he said.
    There were a few taxis and a single bus parked in a car park on the other side of the ruin. Matt could see a road twisting back down the hill and into Cuzco. But that wasn't where they were heading. For the second or third time that night, Matt stopped in total amazement.
    Right in front of them, parked out of sight behind the Inca throne, a heli-copter stood waiting for them with two more Indians on guard, looking out anxiously for any sign of the police. Matt could see now how much organization had gone into finding him. From the moment that he had run out of the main square in Cuzco, an Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star invisible net had been drawing in on him, waiting to scoop him out.

    "You're not serious," Matt muttered.
    "We must go long way," Atoc said.
    "Where's the pilot?"
    "I'm the pilot."
    There were just four seats in the helicopter, two in the front, two behind. The cabin was little more than a glass bubble in a metal frame with the rotors hanging limp above. One of the Indians opened the door. Matt hesitated. But wherever they were going, it had to be better than Cuzco. Captain Rodriguez was there, looking for him. The helicopter would take him out of the city. Maybe it would even take him out of Peru.
    But before he could move, he heard the sound he had most dreaded: sirens. The police were on their way, com-ing to investigate.
    Someone must have seen the helicopter land. And suddenly, there they were, two cars no bigger than toys, bouncing up the road still far below but getting nearer all the time. Atoc pushed Matt forward.
    It was defi-nitely time to go.
    But Pedro wasn't budging. Matt could see how tense he was, his fists clenched, refusing to move. Pedro turned to Atoc and let loose a torrent of Spanish. Atoc tried to reason with him. Matt remembered how he had felt as they took off from Heathrow. He had been