Evil Star

by Anthony Horowitz

  Something was happening in Cuzco. Someone was trying to help them. First it had been the old woman, now it was the food seller. But who were they? How had they even known that he and Pedro were there? Matt wondered if he was imagining things. And no matter how many people tried to help them, he still couldn’t see how they were going to get away.

  They turned another corner and suddenly Matt knew where they were. This was one of the most famous streets in the city. Just a few hours earlier it had been filled with tourist groups and guides; now it was completely empty, lit only by the glow from the sky. One side of the street was lined by old Inca walls, ten metres high. Matt recognized the huge stones, slotted so ingeniously together. Pedro was leaning against one of them, panting for breath.

  “Which way?” Matt asked.

  Pedro shrugged. Either he was too exhausted to talk or he had come to the same conclusion as Matt. There was no way out so it didn’t matter where they went.

  They started forward, slowly, making their way down the deserted street. They could hear shouting all around them, disembodied voices flitting like night creatures, everywhere. Only one thing was certain. Their pursuers were getting closer all the time.

  And the street led nowhere. It was blocked by a tall metal gate that had been swung across the end, and locked.

  There was no way back. Matt could hear footsteps rushing up behind them and knew that the police were only seconds away. He no longer had the heart to run or to hide. He reached out and rattled the gate. It was too high to climb. Pedro had given up too. He was looking angry and exhausted – the bitterness of defeat obvious in his eyes.

  “Amigos!”

  The voice came from just behind them. Matt turned. Incredibly, there was a young man standing in the street just a couple of metres away. He was wearing a red-and-mauve poncho, jeans and a woven hat that had flaps hanging down over his ears. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

  And Matt was sure he knew him. For a strange, unnerving moment, he was sure it was Micos. But Micos was dead. So who…?

  “Amigos,” the man repeated. “Come quickly!”

  Amigos. It was the one word of Spanish that Matt knew.

  Friends.

  The man gestured. Matt looked past him and saw an incredible sight. Part of the wall had swung open, revealing a secret door with at least seven sides. It was impossible to imagine the hinge mechanism that had made it work but when the door was closed it would be completely invisible. Matt and Pedro had just walked past it without realizing it was there. Millions of tourists must have done the same. Matt took a step forward. There was a passage inside the wall. He could just make out a narrow corridor but it ended almost at once in total blackness.

  “No.” Pedro shook his head. He was afraid.

  The man spoke to him quietly and quickly in Spanish, then turned back to Matt. “The police will be here very soon,” he said. “If you want to live, you must trust me. Come now…”

  “Who are you?” Matt asked.

  The man made no reply and Matt understood. He wasn’t prepared to talk about this, not now. An amazing secret – this hidden door – had been revealed to them. It had to be closed before the police, or anyone else, saw it.

  Pedro was looking at him, waiting for him to make a decision. Matt nodded. The two of them stepped inside the wall. The man followed. The door swung shut behind them.

  * * *

  Blackness.

  Matt couldn’t hear anything apart from the sound of his own breathing. He stood in pitch darkness and it occurred to him that he could have died – that death might not be so different from this. He had been cut off from the city of Cuzco the moment the wall closed. There was a slight dampness in the air that clung to his skin, but apart from that he felt nothing. He had to force himself not to panic, to avoid the thought that he might just have been buried alive.

  Then the man in the poncho turned on an electric torch and the light sprang out to reveal a narrow corridor with a staircase leading down. They were inside the wall. The great stones were on both sides. Where did the steps lead? Matt couldn’t even begin to guess.

  The light also showed the face of the man who had come to their rescue. Matt had only glimpsed him in the street and the earflaps of his hat had concealed much of his face. Looking at him more closely, he saw that he did bear a very close resemblance to Micos – although without the scar. He was also slightly thinner, with a narrow chin and the beginnings of a beard. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

  “Who are you?” Matt asked again. He wondered if his voice would carry out into the street. But that was impossible. The walls were at least a metre thick.

  “My name is Atoc,” the man replied. His accent was strange. There was a hint of Spanish in it but also something else, some sort of native Indian.

  Atoc was the name that Micos had spoken just before he died. He had wanted to get a message to this man. His brother? Matt hoped not but that would explain why they looked so alike.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “It is an old, Inca passage. Very secret. Very few people know.”

  “Where does it lead?”

  “I take you somewhere safe where Salamanda cannot find you. There are friends waiting but it is far and there is still much danger. Police looking everywhere. We cannot talk now.”

  Atoc turned to Pedro and spoke briefly in Spanish. Once again, to Matt’s ears his accent sounded strange. Presumably he was translating what he had just said. Pedro nodded. A decision had been made.

  “This way,” Atoc said. He swung the light at the stairs. “We go down. It will be easier soon.”

  They began to climb down. Matt tried to count the steps but after twenty-five he gave up. The walls were very narrow, pressing in on them from both sides, and he could feel the weight of the earth pushing down from above. There was a heaviness in his ears and the air was getting cold. He could only see a few steps at a time. The torch wasn’t powerful enough to light much more. But as they reached the bottom with a second passageway bending round ahead of them, he became aware of a strange, yellow glow, coming from somewhere just out of sight. They began to walk forward and soon Atoc switched off the torch. The way ahead was lit, but not by an electric light. Matt turned the corner and gasped.

  The passage ran on for as far as he could see, with flames burning in small silver cups set into the walls, about twenty metres apart. They must have been fed by a hidden oil supply. But it was the walls themselves that caught the light, magnified it and reflected it back. The walls were lined with sheets of what looked like brass, but – Matt somehow knew – were actually solid gold.

  How much gold was there in the world? Matt had always thought it was precious because it was rare and he remembered what he had heard outside the temple of Coricancha. The Spanish conquistadors had looted the city. They had been mad with greed. They had taken all the gold they could lay their hands on. Or that was what they had thought. But now he could see that they had found only a fraction of what was there. Tons and tons of it must have been used to make this incredible route far below the city. It was stretching ever further into the distance, picking up the light from the lamps, turning night into day.

  They were not intended to make the journey on foot. Another Indian, dressed like Atoc, was waiting for them with four mules. Matt wondered how the animals could bear to be here, so far underground, but he supposed they must be used to it. The Indian bowed low as he approached. Matt smiled, feeling increasingly uneasy.

  “Please. We must hurry,” Atoc said.

  Matt and Pedro climbed onto the first two mules. Atoc and the Indian took the two behind. There were no saddles, just brightly coloured blankets, tied underneath. Matt had never ridden an animal in his life and wondered how he was meant to make this one go. But the mule knew what it was doing. The moment all four of them had mounted, it set off at a fast pace, its hooves thudding rhythmically on the soft, earth-covered floor.
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  One after another, the flickering oil lamps lit their progress. Nobody spoke. Matt noticed that some of the gold panels had designs beaten into them: faces and warrior figures bristling with weapons. After a while, the passage widened and they passed countless treasures, lined up against the walls: jars and pitchers, cups and trays, idols and funeral masks – many of them made of silver and gold. He wondered how long it would take them to reach wherever they were going. The fact that he had no idea of their destination only made the journey seem longer. And it was almost impossible to measure the passing of time. All he knew was that they were climbing. The path had been sloping upward almost from the start, but he was sure they were getting no closer to the surface. So they must be heading out of Cuzco, into the mountains. That was the only possible explanation.

  After at least one hour and possibly as much as two, they suddenly stopped. Despite everything, Matt had been drifting into sleep and he was nearly thrown right over the animal’s head. His legs were sore from constantly rubbing against the coarse hair. And he had added the smell of mule to the many other smells he had picked up since Lima.

  “We walk from here,” Atoc said.

  They all dismounted, leaving the animals with the other Indian who had never spoken, not even to 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 the mechanism being used was similar to the one that had first opened the wall and let them in.

  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.

  They began to climb. Matt could see a circle ahead of him, lit by a white light that seemed to hang in the far distance. Some sort of tattered curtain hung down. It was only as he passed through that he realized that this was the mouth of a cave, surrounded by foliage, and that the light was the full moon. And then he was back out in the open, on a hillside high above Cuzco, with two more Indians in ponchos bowing at him, just like the man in the tunnel.

  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 a cave. But it only ran a couple of metres. The back wall was solid. The steps had disappeared. 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 impossible to find as the entrance.

  So what now?

  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 football stadium, a theatre, a fortress … or perhaps a mix of all three. There was a flat area, roughly circular in shape, covered by grass and surrounded by gigantic boulders that had been arranged in a zigzagging line. There were three levels to the stadium. Whatever activity had once taken place in the arena 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 wandering through the ruins. Nobody took any notice of their arrival. They had come out of nowhere and Atoc had made sure nobody had seen them arrive.

  “This … Sacsayhuamán,” he told Matt. “Sacsayhuamán means ‘Royal Eagle’ and this place was once 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 been cut into the rock on the opposite side. There was a girl in a fleece 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, out of sight behind the Inca throne, a helicopter stood waiting for them with two more Indians on guard, looking out anxiously for any sign of the police. Matt could now see how much organization had gone into finding him. From the moment he had run out of the main square in Cuzco, an 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. I fly you.”

  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 limply 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, coming 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 definitely time to leave.

  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 sweating. Pedro would never have flown in his life, and to him this helicopter must look like some sort of nightmare, oversized insect.

  The police cars were getting closer. Their headlights seemed to be reaching out in front of them, eager to arrive first. Pedro stayed where he was. He pointed at the helicopter and snapped out a few ugly words. Atoc held up his hands – a gesture of surrender – but at the same time he spoke again. His voice was soft despite the urgency. The first police car was perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

  At last Pedro turned to Matt. “Tú qué piensas?” he asked.

  Matt hoped he’d understood. “It’s OK,” he said. “I think we should go.”

  Pedro let out a deep breath. He unclenched his fists, ran forward and clambered in. Matt could see how much effort it took. He followed. Atoc climbed into the front seat and punched at the controls. The rotors began to turn.

  Matt wondered if they had left it too late. It would be several minutes before the helicopter was ready for take-off. The rotors were turning so slowly that he could see each one. The police cars were so close now that he could make out the men inside. Pedro wasn’t even watching. As the engine began to scream, he went completely white and sat frozen, staring out at the sky. The first police car reached the car park and tore over the gravel, heading towards them. But then its windscreen shattered and Matt saw that the Indian who had opened the door for them was holding a slingshot, like Pedro’s. He had hurled a stone at the car and scored a direct hit. The police car wheeled around and came to a halt. Too suddenly. The second police car smashed straight into it, spinning it round. Both cars stalled and were still.

  The doors opened and uniformed men tumbled out, pulling guns from their holsters. The two Indians next to the helicopter turned and ran. Matt wondered what would happen next. They were sitting targets. The rotors still weren’t turning fast enough. He glanced round and saw the tourists diving for cover. One of the policemen took aim.

  But the rotors had finally picked up speed. Suddenly the dust rose in a cloud. The policemen disappeared from sight and Matt guessed they must have been blinded. Pedro cried out. The entire cabin had rocked as Atoc played with the controls. Then he pushed forward and the helicopter lurched into the air, hovered for a moment, then spun round and flew into the moonlight. Behind them, the great stones of Sacsayhuamán quickly shrank away.

  The policemen cursed and rubbed grit out of their eyes. By the time they were able to look up, the helicopter had gone.

  THROUGH THE CLOUD FOREST

>   There was no view. As the helicopter droned on through the night, Matt was as disoriented as he had been when he first entered the wall. The lights of Cuzco had long since faded behind them and for a time the moon had been their only guide. But even that had disappeared, swallowed up by clouds so thick, it was hard to believe they could actually float in the air. Atoc remained clamped over the controls, his face lit by a soft, green light. The helicopter blades thudded in the air, although sometimes Matt had the impression that they weren’t moving at all, but were somehow stuck in the gluey stillness of the night.

  Pedro hadn’t spoken a word since take-off. Nor had he looked out of the window. His whole body was rigid, his eyes fixed on the pilot as if he couldn’t believe he knew how to fly this machine – or that he might forget at any time. Eventually he fell asleep and Matt must have followed him because suddenly he was back at sea, making an altogether different journey, drifting with the tide.

  “Do you still think I’m one of the Five?” Pedro asked.

  “Of course.” Matt was surprised by the question. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m a stupid coward. I was too scared to get into the helicopter. I almost got us caught by the police. I’m still scared now, even though I’m asleep.”

  Matt shook his head. “You’re not a coward,” he said. “If you want the truth, I’m afraid of flying too.”

  “I saw planes flying out of Lima. When I was doing my juggling, near the airport. I could never understand how anything so heavy could fly. I still don’t.” Pedro scowled. “You really think I’m one of the Five?”

  “I know you are. And I’m glad you’re with me, Pedro. When I think about it, I’ve never had a real friend. Not for as long as I can remember.”

  “I stole your watch!”

  “You’re welcome to it. I’ll get another…”

  They both woke at the same moment. The helicopter had landed.

  Matt looked out of the window while Pedro stretched and yawned. They had come to a halt in a field in the middle of nowhere. Three oil lamps had been laid out on the grass – Atoc would have been able to see them from the air and had used them to know where to land. But there were no other lights anywhere. Instead, the flames illuminated a line of trees, the edge of what must be thick jungle. A hand slapped against the helicopter window and Matt started, but Atoc had been expecting it.