Evil Star (10 page)

"What about it?" Matt asked.

"It's why I chose this place to meet. It's in the diary."

"That's not possible." Matt tried to work it out. The diary had been written in the sixteenth century, four hun-dred years ago. Parts of this church were older. Parts of it were quite modern. Either way, how could the monk have known about the existence of a single door?

"Of course it's not possible," Morton agreed. "But that doesn't matter. I want you to go through the door and I want you to bring me something from the other side. It doesn't matter what it is. Whatever you choose will prove to me that you are . . . who they say you are."

"What's on the other side?"

“You tell me. Bring me whatever you find. I'll wait for you here."

"Why don't you come with me?"

“You really do know nothing," Morton said. Suddenly his voice was urgent again. "We don't have time to argue. Do as I say. Do it now.

Or I'll leave and you'll never hear from me again."

Matt sighed. He didn't understand any of it. But there was no point in answering back. He wanted this to be over. This was the only way. He glanced one last time at the book-seller, then went over to the door. Slowly he reached out, his hand resting on the iron handle.

It was only now that it occurred to him that although the door was too small for the church, it was perfectly in proportion with his own Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star height.

It had been built for a child.

He turned the handle. Opened the door. And stepped through.

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

While Matt and William Morton had been talking, neither of
them had heard
the front door of the church open again. Nor had they seen the man who had come in. He was
dirty, dressed in rags, with a beard and a broken nose. Matt had noticed him in Cannon Street when he had come out of the pub, pretending to be drunk.

The man stood for a moment, allowing his eyes to become used to the gloom, then moved down toward the apse. It didn't take him long to find the bookseller. Morton was standing next to a half-size door, shifting his ample weight from one foot to the other as if he were waiting to go into the dentist. There was a square parcel, wrapped in brown paper, held in his hand.

The diary .. .

It seemed that the boy had gone. But the boy wasn't important. The man with the broken nose had been paid to kill Morton and take the book. If the boy was there, he would die, too. But he wasn't and the man was secretly pleased. Killing children was occasionally necessary but always unpleasant.

He reached into the pocket of his raincoat and took something out.

The knife was only about ten centimeters long, but that didn't matter.

The man knew how to use it. He could kill with a knife half that size.

The man noticed the altar ahead of him and briefly crossed himself, Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star using the blade of the knife. The point touched his head, his chest, both his shoulders.

Then, with a smile, he continued on his way.

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

That was Matt's first thought. When he had gone into the church, it had been a normal London summer's day. That is, it had been sunny but cool, and most people had been glad it wasn't raining. He had only been in the church for a few minutes, but in that time the sun seemed to have intensified. And the sky was the wrong color. It was an intense, Mediterranean blue. All the clouds had disappeared.

And that wasn't the only thing that was wrong.

Matt hadn't been sure what he would find on the other side of the door. He had been half expecting to step back out into Cannon Street. Instead he was in a cloister, a cov-ered walkway forming a square around a courtyard with a fountain in the middle. Well, there was nothing surprising about that. Lots of churches had cloisters. It was where the priests went to walk and to think about their next sermon or whatever.

But this cloister was completely different from the church. It looked older — and more beautiful. The pillars holding up the arches were more ornate. And the fountain was really lovely, carved out of some sort of white stone with crystal-clear water splashing down from one basin to another. Matt knew almost nothing about art or architecture, but even he could see that there was something about the fountain that wasn't quite English. The same was true of the whole cloister. He cast his eyes from the perfectly mown grass to the brilliant flowers tumbling out of huge, terra-cotta pots. How could a Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star church as shabby and as neglected as St. Meredith's have managed to hold on to a courtyard as perfect as this?

He looked back at the church from which he had just come. And that was another thing. Was he going mad or was the brickwork somehow different on the outside? There was a square tower rising up above him but no sign of a steeple, modern or otherwise. Well, perhaps it was hidden by the angle of the wall. But even so, Matt had to fight to stop himself from thinking an absurd thought.

This was a completely different building from the one he'd just come out of.

No.

It was some sort of illusion. William Morton was delib-erately trying to trick him.

The bookseller had told him to bring something back with him. It didn't matter what and he didn't care. All Matt wanted to do was to get out of here, to get back onto famil-iar ground. He stepped forward and plucked a bright, mauve flower out of one of the pots.

He felt stupid, holding a flower, but he couldn't see anything else and he didn't want to spend any more time here searching. He turned round and was about to walk back when someone stepped in front of him. It was a young man, dressed in a brown robe. A monk.

And there was Matt, in his jeans and hooded sweatshirt, caught picking flowers in the middle of the cloister.

"Hi!" Matt didn't know what to say. He held up the flower. "I was told to get this. It's for a friend."

The monk spoke to him. But not in English. Listening to the strange language, Matt thought it might be Spanish or Italian. The monk didn't sound angry. He was trying to be friendly — although he was Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star obviously puzzled.

"Do you speak English?" Matt asked.

The monk held up a finger and a thumb, almost touch-ing. The universal symbol for "a little."

"I have to go," Matt said. He pointed at the door. "I have a friend . . ."

The monk didn't try to stop him. Matt opened the door and went back through.

He was back in St. Meredith's.

But William Morton wasn't there.

Matt looked around him, feeling increasingly foolish with the flower in his hand. It seemed that the bookseller had been playing tricks on him. While Matt had been out in the cloister, Morton had been making his getaway. He had never intended to hand over the diary.

It was all for nothing.

And then the woman screamed.

She screamed once, her voice so loud and high-pitched that it must surely have been heard all over Shoreditch. The scream flew up into the church to be joined by a second and then a third, each scream becoming an echo of the other. Matt looked around and saw her, an old woman wrapped up in black, standing a few meters away, pointing down. At the same time, he saw the blood on the cold, stone floor.

He ran forward.

William Morton was lying on his back, his hand clamped to his stomach, trying to hold shut the wound that the knife had made.

There was a lot of blood. At first Matt thought he must be dead. The Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star woman was still screaming. None of the other worshippers had come near, although Matt could hear them whispering, murmuring, afraid to show them-selves. Then the bookseller opened his eyes and saw Matt, saw what Matt was holding. Despite everything, he smiled to himself. It was as if Matt had brought flowers to the funeral he was about to have.

"You are . . ." he began.

Just two words. Then he died.

At the same time, the doors were flung open and half a dozen men ran in. Matt looked up and saw police uniforms. So the Nexus hadn't been lying to him. There really had been a protective ring around the church. It was just that it hadn't worked. The police had arrived too late.

He was surrounded. More people were screaming. The police were trying to keep them back. More officers came through the door. Matt recognized one of them. It was Tarrant, the assistant commissioner.

He looked grim.

Richard Cole arrived a few minutes later, bursting in with Fabian.

By now the body had been covered. The con-gregation had left.

More police officers had arrived. Matt was sitting on his own, holding the flower which had already begun to wilt. He was very still. There was blood on one of his sneakers.

"Are you okay?" Richard asked. His face was filled with horror.

"Yeah. Sure." Matt wondered if he was in shock. He didn't feel anything. "I didn't get the diary," he said. "Who-ever killed him took it."

"How did they know he was here?" Fabian muttered. "Nobody knew Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star about the meeting. He told only us."

"Somebody knew," Matt said. He waved a hand in the direction of the dead man. "They took the diary. He had it with him when we met but just now I looked and it wasn't there."

"To hell with the diary," Richard said. “You were with him. You could have been killed, too." He paused and frowned. "What happened?" he asked. "Did you see who it was?"

"No. I was out in the cloister. He made me get him this." Matt held up the flower.

Now it was Fabian's turn to look puzzled. "What clois-ter?" he asked.

"The church has a cloister," Matt said. "Morton asked me to go there. He said it was some sort of test, but I think he was lying."

"This church has no cloister," Fabian said.

"It's through there." Matt looked in the direction of the door.

"Let's go out," Richard said. “You need some air."

"There is no cloister," Fabian insisted.

Angrily, Matt stood up and walked over to the door. "It's through here," he said.

He opened the door. And stopped dead.

There was no cloister on the other side. There were no flowers, no fountain, no monks. Instead, he found himself looking at an alleyway lined with dustbins and, on the other side, a grimy backyard filled with rubble and broken cement.

He looked down at the flower in his hand and then threw it down as if it were scalding him. The flower lay floating in a puddle of brown rainwater. There was no other color anywhere around.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

Chapter 7 Danger Area

In the end, it all seemed too easy.

Matt didn't want any part of it. He would have liked to forget the Nexus, the Old Ones, William Morton, the diary, the second gate, and all the other weird things that had somehow closed in on him and taken over his life. Cer-tainly, he had no great desire to visit Peru. And yet, here he was at midday, sitting on a British Airways jumbo jet on the runway at Heathrow Airport, Flight 207 to Lima via Miami. Once again, he got the feeling that he hadn't chosen to be here. It had just happened.

After the death of the bookseller at St. Meredith's church, there had been another meeting of the Nexus — and that was when they had put it to him.

"Matt, we want to send you to Peru." This time, Susan Ashwood had done most of the talking. Maybe they felt she knew him best.

"We've lost the diary. It wasn't your fault, but it's a catastrophe. It means that whoever was bidding for it in South America probably has it, or will have it soon. The diary will show them how to find the gate. Worse than that, it may show them how to open it."

"There's nothing Matt can do," Richard said. "You send him all the way across the world . . . what's the point?"

"I can't really answer that, Mr. Cole. How can I explain? Imagine this were a game of chess. Losing Morton was like losing a pawn.

Now, sending you to Peru, it's as if we're advancing a knight. In the Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star end, it may be too late. It may not help. But at least it shows we're still on the attack."

"The boy and the gate are linked," Natalie Johnson said. Matt could see that the American woman had already made up her mind. "He's part of it. Something is going to happen in Peru — and whatever it is, he should be there."

"Well, Peru's a big country. Where's he supposed to begin?"

"In the capital. Lima."

"Why there?"

"We may have one lead," Tarrant explained. "William Morton had his cell phone with him when he was mur-dered. Fortunately for us, his killer left it behind. I've looked at it, and it seems he made a dozen calls in the week before he died. Some of them to us, of course. But three of them were to a number in Lima."

"Salamanda News International," the Frenchman said.

"What's that?" Richard asked.

"It's one of the biggest businesses on the whole damned continent,"

Natalie Johnson explained. "And the man who fronts it, Diego Salamanda, is one of the richest. I've had dealings with him in the past, but I've never met him. I've heard he's disabled in some way and he keeps himself very much to himself. He runs newspapers, TV

and satellite sta-tions, publishing houses, and hotels. He does it out of an office in Lima."

"Was he the one trying to buy the diary?"

"Perhaps. We can't know for sure. But not much hap-pens within his organization without him knowing it, so it probably comes down to the same thing. If it's Salamanda we're up against, that's bad news.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star He's powerful. But on the other hand, maybe it's good that we know who the enemy is. At least it tells us where to start."

"Okay." Richard nodded. "So you send Matt to Lima. Then what does he do?"

"He stays with me as my guest," Fabian replied. "You will both be welcome in my home. I told you already that I have a house in Barranco. It is a quiet part of the city where many artists and writers live. I'm not far from the beach. You will be safe there."