The Lure

by Bill Napier

Overview

A signal from space, a conspiracy on Earth

An underground research station in Eastern Europe is suddenly bombarded with rhythmic bursts of subnuclear particles from beyond Earth – a pattern so complex it can only come from a highly evolved intelligence.

As the messages are decoded, the scientists are amazed by the information they reveal: secrets of a technology far in advance of our own, suggesting that a benign civilization wishes to share knowledge with humankind.

Surely, the scientists argue, the signal should be acknowledged? But the world’s superpowers have other ideas, and suddenly the scientists find themselves at the heart of a global conspiracy…

The Lure is an extraordinary and original thriller, perfect for fans of Scott Mariani, Dan Brown and Clive Cussler.

Professor Bill Napier is a Scottish astronomer at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland and an honorary professor at the Institute for Astrobiology of Cardiff University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788630436
Publisher:	Canelo
Publication date:	11/04/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	427
Sales rank:	391,874
File size:	492 KB

About the Author

Bill Napier was born in Scotland in 1940. He studied astronomy at Glasgow University, and has spent most of his career as an astronomer at observatories in Scotland, Italy, and Northern Ireland. He is an honorary professor in the Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University. In his research he has discovered a process which allows life to spread around the Galaxy, taking hold wherever it finds suitable environments—such as the Earth. He now lives in Ireland with his wife Nancy and divides his time between writing novels and carrying out research with colleagues in Wales and California. He likes to cook but faces stiff competition from wife and children.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Cavern

The Tatras in winter: a barren, snow-covered massif in Eastern Europe. Heavy, snow-laden clouds hid the tops of the highest peaks, and fingers of mist drifted down the valleys between them. And inside the massif, under the feet of the skiers and the mountain ramblers, another world.

Entrance to this other world was through a plain steel door set into a natural recess in the rock. There were no signs to proclaim ownership, or to say what lay behind it. It was reached by a steep, three-hundred-metre climb up a snowy path which zig-zagged between the conifers. The path was unmarked, and led off from a highway along which the skiers, ramblers and climbers came and went in their snow-chained cars.

The man approaching this door had a wide, turned-down mouth and narrow lips which made him look vaguely like a giant frog. Low gunmetal sunlight and white mountain peaks reflected from his bulbous sunglasses. The same sunlight was glittering off his companion's sapphire earrings. She was about the same age, taller, long-faced, with a naturally severe expression and long dark hair. She had light blue eyes. They were both puffing slightly from the climb.

The man fumbled for a key, pulled at the heavy door. It opened smoothly and they stepped through it, out of the cold sunshine and the snow, into the subterranean world.

Harsh lights, fixed at intervals in a rocky wall, lit up a flight of roughly carved stone steps. The man led the way down these, gripping a handrail. The steps ended at a small, flat concrete platform. Next to it was a metal cage, its wire-mesh sides painted a dirty yellow. It bobbed up and down alarmingly as they squeezed into it. He pulled the elevator door shut with a metallic clash!

The woman glanced up. In the semi-dark, twenty feet above them, she could make out what seemed to be miles of braided steel cable wrapped around a giant cylinder, and a confusing array of black-painted girders and steel pins driven into the rock. A rivulet of water was trickling down a rock face. 'Tell me, Charlie. Are these girders ever checked for rust?' The man grinned, said, 'Nope,' and pressed a red button.

The cage plunged, reaching a brisk, near-silent terminal speed after some seconds. The woman's stomach settled back in place and she gave the man an embarrassed little smile. The overhead elevator lights revealed a coarsely cut tunnel of rock hurtling upwards, inches from them. The cage was held in place by black plastic sleeves through which four shiny metal tubes, squarely placed at each corner of the tunnel, were sliding with a faint, high-pitched whine.

She had done the cage hundreds of times, but still it left her feeling vaguely uneasy. Cold air was billowing around them, driven by the ram pressure of the plunging cage. 'By the way, I had a BBC producer on the line.'

The man took off his sunglasses. 'Really?' 'Yes, they'd like to do a documentary. But I put them off.'

The man's round face showed surprise and dismay. 'Hell, Svetlana, why did you do that? We can use all the profile we can get.'

'I didn't trust her. It was something she said, almost in passing. That we're not even sure these particles exist. That we could be on a wild-goose chase and all this public money could be for nothing. What use is this stuff, we could heat a thousand pensioners for the same money – that sort of thing.'

'All of which is true.' A lion snarled. There was a brief glimpse of a narrow ledge, and an illuminated tunnel, and fifty metres along it a cloud of spray from a roaring river; but in an instant image and noise had vanished upwards.

Now came the climax of the joyride, the bit she hated. The tunnel suddenly opened out and the cage was hurtling down from the roof of a cavern the size of a cathedral. She blinked at the sight of giant stalactites, and machinery scattered around a rocky floor rushing up at them. Then the black rings were gripping the metal tubes and there was a metallic screech and the elevator had slowed to a halt, and the grip of the rings loosened and the cage bobbed slowly up and down just above a concrete platform.

*
The room adjoining the cavern was small, brightly lit and bleakly furnished, with no more than a few grey lockers and a table on which sat a black box attached to a Geiger counter.

They picked up heavy yellow torches and made their way to another metal door. For a moment, they were in pitch black and there was a gust of cool air, but then the torchlight was showing a long, low, natural tunnel, curving out of sight. Overhead, millions of stalactites hung down like needle-sharp fangs. The man led the way along a rough path to a narrow rope bridge about twenty metres long. It swayed dangerously as he marched over it; blackness lay below. Then they were over it and turning into another tunnel, this one smaller.

Wavering torchlight, scattering off a pagoda-like stalagmite ahead of them. A man in a hurry. A deep Slavic voice echoed along the tunnel: 'Charlee!'

The torch appeared, dazzling their eyes, held by an immensely fat man dressed in a thick, blue one-piece suit.

Vashislav Shtyrkov, the Russian. He was waving urgently and there was tremendous excitement in his voice. 'We have a signal!'

They broke into a trot, following Shtyrkov. A short, final stretch of tunnel, and they were through another door and blinking in the fluorescent lights of a large, low-ceilinged, warm room.

The room was carpeted red, with light yellow wallpaper and a blue ceiling. It was furnished with leather armchairs and desks and computers. At the far end of the room, an open door led off to a corridor. The wall on the left was taken up with three panels, each about six feet by six, and labelled XY, XZ and YZ in black letters. The XY panel contained thousands of little red light bulbs, laid out in rows. The bulbs in the XZ panel were green, and the YZ bulbs were blue. None of them was lit. On the right, a large black blind had been pulled down; it took up almost half the wall. To the right of the blind was a wooden door, and to its left a digital clock labelled UT showed 07:17; below it another clock, labelled Local Time, showed 09:17. A long teak desk, cluttered with computers and printers, took up the centre of the room.

'Look at this,' said Shtyrkov, tapping at a computer terminal. Rows of numbers tumbled down the screen, most of them zero.

'Our first hit?' Charlie's voice was jubilant. 'We finally got a dark matter particle?'

'No, Charlee, not a hit. Five hits.'

'What?'

'And all within the last seven hours.'

Charlie stared at the Russian, open-mouthed.

'Charlee.' Shtyrkov's face was grim. 'That is not all.'

Charlie waited.

'The hits,' Shtyrkov said. 'They are arriving at regular intervals.'

'Regular intervals?' Charlie's tone was one of utter disbelief.

'Every one hour and twenty-four minutes.'

There was a long silence while Charlie assimilated this. Then: 'I'm sorry, but that's just lunacy.'

'Charlee. The particles are arriving at regular intervals.'

Charlie's voice was flat. 'Don't be absurd, Vashislav. That can't happen. It's impossible.'

'It has to be a bug. Some equipment failure,' Svetlana said.

Vashislav shook his head. 'It's your equipment, Svetlana, and you know it can't be that. The photodetectors work independently of each other. Each particle is being picked up by hundreds of them.'

'Vashislav, what's the alternative?'

Shtyrkov's eyes were staring. 'That it's real?'

'Don't be crazy. It has to be a bug.'

Shtyrkov shook his head like a stubborn child.

'When's the next one due?' Svetlana asked.

'The next particle will come in ... forty-five seconds. It will arrive at seven twenty forty on the UT clock.'

'Are the speakers on?' Charlie asked nobody.

Svetlana was shivering. 'This is weird.'

'Weird?' Shtyrkov raised his voice. 'Svetlana, it is supernatural.' He looked at the wall clocks. 'You are just in time. We have thirty seconds.'

'It won't come.'

'It will come, Charlee, it will come. Ten seconds.' The Russian's eyes were fixed on the clock showing Universal Time.

'Time's up —'

A click! loud and clear, from all three speakers. Three streaks of light showed briefly on the panels, one red, one green, one blue.

'Yes!' the Russian shouted.

Charlie said, 'My God.'

A second click! Another trio of streaks.

They fell silent.

A third click!

And then the speakers roared.

Light blazed from the panels and Shtyrkov shouted something in Russian, his voice barely heard over the roar, and Svetlana shrank back in fear. Charlie ran to switches on the wall and they were momentarily in blackness. But then an electric motor slowly raised the big blind, gradually revealing another cavern, this one filled with a lake. The lake was a kilometre across and it was glowing, its rocky bottom visible in detail as if lit up by searchlights. The walls of the cavern were like a cloudy sky, reflecting the milky-white light from the water.

How long it went on Svetlana didn't know. She became aware of Charlie shouting, 'Come back, you idiot!' and then through the big window she saw the black silhouette of a man running towards the lake, arms spread wide. At first she thought Shtyrkov was about to jump into the water but then he was running on to a catwalk, jumping and pirouetting above the water, arms spread wide like a boy playing at Spitfires.

Then, suddenly, silence.

Blackness.

Svetlana praying quietly in the dark.

Charlie hyperventilating.

Shtyrkov singing, some Russian ballad, his voice echoing around the huge cavern, the song giving way to an outburst of insane laughter.

CHAPTER 2

The Sign

Gibson was leaning over Shtyrkov's shoulder, a wild expression on his face. The Russian was typing at such a speed that the individual clicks were almost lost and there was just a steady machine-gun rattle from the keyboard. Occasionally the fat scientist would mutter excitedly to himself in Russian.

Svetlana was trembling. A solitary question kept pounding in her head: What was that? What? But she was too excited to think. Vashislav will figure it out.

And then a less noble thought intruded: And he'll grab all the credit if I'm not careful. I'll be a glorified sparks.

She saw the paper in the prestigious pages of Nature or Science: Detection of a Swarm of Dark Matter Particles by Vashislav Shtyrkov. And, buried amongst the footnotes: With acknowledgements to Svetlana, faithful Tonto to my Lone Ranger.

And she saw Shtyrkov and Gibson in Stockholm, bowing to let the King of Sweden drape the coveted Nobel medal around their necks, while she dutifully applauded in the audience.

She tried to put the ugly vision aside, but it kept gnawing. And she thought: This will never happen to me again. Don't let them grab all the credit. Don't!

For something to do she moved to a shelf and pressed buttons on a DVD recorder. The security camera played back the sequence of Shtyrkov running up and down at the edge of the lake, arms waving and singing like a drunk man. Then it showed him lumbering around on a catwalk, lying down and splashing water. Then he was running back to land, and for some seconds the camera showed only the white-glowing lake, and the iron catwalks and the cavern walls. Then a rowing boat appeared on screen, the Russian heaving at the oar as he headed for the centre of the luminous water. And then, suddenly, there was darkness, with only the digital clock in the corner of the picture to show that the camera was still running.

Shtyrkov's voice brought her back to the present. The Russian was looking at Gibson triumphantly. 'Done. It filled the DVD.'

'The whole disk? All ninety gigabytes?'

'There was more, much much more. But the SCSI interface can only absorb forty megabytes a second. We've lost a mountain of stuff.'

Svetlana turned from the DVD recorder and her dark thoughts. 'But you got something? You're sure?'

Gibson's eyes were shining and there was a light sweat on his brow. 'Yes,' he told her. 'One stuffed disk and a Nobel Prize. No question.'

Shtyrkov clicked his tongue in irritation. 'No doubt, but what was it, Charlee? What was it?'

Gibson looked as if the question hadn't occurred to him. 'Whatever it was, it's not in the book.'

Svetlana appraised her colleagues: 'Security. Until we've had a chance to look at this and make some sense of it, none of us breathes a word of this to anyone. Are we all agreed?'

'Absolutely.' Shtyrkov was still breathless from his lakeside exertions. 'This stays under wraps, as the Americans say, until we have understood it. Then we announce it to the world, whatever it is.'

Svetlana said, 'We analyse the data together and make a joint announcement. Nobody tries to steal a march on anyone else.'

Shtyrkov was still doing things at the computer. He swivelled to face them. 'It's no good down here. We don't have the computing power and the Net access. We need some office where we can work in secret. We should disperse to our institutes, keep our mouths shut and agree to meet up at some location, when something has been set up.'

Svetlana stared at the fat Russian. 'Disperse? Are you mad? One of us would let it slip. And who would hold the disk?'

Gibson bristled. 'As principal investigator here I'd have thought that's obvious.'

Shtyrkov managed to convey both surprise and injured innocence. 'We can surely trust each other.'

Svetlana's expression was bordering on the ferocious. She could hardly contain herself. She stabbed a finger at Shtyrkov as she spoke. 'Vashislav, I've spent twelve years of my life down this hole gambling that one day we'll pick up a dark matter particle. Well, we've done it. I've missed out on everything else including children to do it. This is our child – my child – and if you think I'm going to risk having it taken from me ...'

'That's crazy talk. I don't want to take a child from its mother,' Shtyrkov complained.

'Vashislav, how do I know you won't make out I'm just the wiring technician and give yourself the lion's share of the kudos? You might even —'

'Be silent, woman!' Svetlana opened her mouth incredulously, but Shtyrkov's bass voice, when raised, had an arresting effect. He continued, 'There is no need for this. We are in this together, you madwoman. Of course we will announce this jointly.'

Gibson said, 'I'm the PI here. I make the decisions on that.'

Shtyrkov seemed not to have heard. 'But I understand your maternal instincts and we must respect them. I have an idea.'

'What?' Svetlana demanded.

The Russian touched the side of his nose with his finger. 'I have friends.'

Gibson said, 'Vashislav, like I keep saying, I'm the chief investigator here. It's my name on the application form.'

'Charlee, you're only the big chief because we needed your name up front for the British grant money.'

Gibson's face was threatening to turn purple. 'You have an idea, Vash? Tell me about it and I'll let you know.'

'Go to hell.' Shtyrkov glanced at the wall clock. He muttered to himself: 'On, vozmozhno, eschye spit.' Then he picked up a telephone, turning his back to the others.

Svetlana translated Shtyrkov's Russian to Gibson. Gradually, as the phone calls were made, Gibson's worried expression gave way to a grudging satisfaction. By the time the fat scientist put the telephone down, Gibson was nodding agreement.

Svetlana and Shtyrkov picked their way along the narrow tunnels. The rope bridge was designed to take six normal people and in theory Shtyrkov could have joined her on it, but out of deference to human psychology he let her over first. The little bridge sagged and swayed dramatically as he waddled across, Svetlana lighting his way with shaky torchlight.

The elevator could take two individuals but the fat Russian counted as two. Svetlana disappeared from sight through the cavern ceiling, the cage sliding rapidly up on its metal poles. It always reminded Shtyrkov of an American movie he had seen once, with Batman sliding down a pole into his Batcave. He waited, alone in the big gloomy cavern, his mind racing.

Some minutes later the steel door opened and Gibson appeared, a woollen ski cap pulled down over his ears. He was holding a small plastic box protectively to his chest.

'The disk?' Shtyrkov looked greedily at the box.

'Ye-es.'

'I'm glad the rope bridge held,' Shtyrkov said. 'Imagine losing it.'

'And me.'

'A life is replaceable, Charlee.'

Gibson thought that was probably Russian humour. 'I've cancelled our rooms at the Tatra. We'll drive straight to the castle. If it's where I think it is we'll be there in four or five hours.'

'And?'

'You have influential friends, Vash, I'm impressed. We'll have the castle to ourselves. The administrator's setting things up as we speak. Three picohertz Alphas and a Sun workstation, though where they got these from in this neck of the woods I don't know. We'll be connected to the Net by the time we arrive, and they're giving us a video conferencing facility in case of need.'

'How long have we got?' Shtyrkov wanted to know.

Gibson made a face. 'Until next Sunday morning.'

'But this is Sunday,' Shtyrkov complained, his face showing dismay. 'We need more than a week to get a grip on this.'

'They have some linguists' conference on the Monday after we leave. The staff will have to set things up for them the day before.'

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Lure"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Bill Napier.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
1. The Cavern,
2. The Sign,
3. Celtic Tiger,
4. Bratislava,
5. The Castle,
6. Patterns,
7. The Shtyrkov Conjecture,
8. Decode,
9. Genome,
10. Poet's Dream,
11. The Bishop and the Chorus Girl,
12. Icosahedron,
13. Moscow Chatline,
14. Kanchenjunga,
15. The Observer,
16. The Whirlpool Galaxy,
17. We Have a Problem,
18. Visions of God,
19. The Wheels of Poseidon,
20. Ogorodnikov,
21. Night Flight to Karkkila,
22. The Frog,
23. Operation PM,
24. Pandora's Box,
25. CIA,
26. Shangri-La,
27. Siege,
28. Where Are They?,
29. Freya,
30. Hanning,
31. Tatras Ride,
32. The Madonna,
33. Rapunzel,
34. Wormhole,
35. Death Squad,
36. Pursuit,
37. Flight by Coach,
38. The Chess Player,
39. Embassy,
40. Kamensky,
41. High Tatras,
42. The X-Theory,
43. The Oort Cloud,
44. Alien Solutions,
45. Brandy and Cigars,
46. Iced Logic,
47. The Judgement,
48. Execution,
49. Endgame,
50. Afterglow,
Postcript,
Teaser,
St. Martin's Paperbacks Titles,
Praise for Bill Napier,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

"Incredible…extraordinary."—Jeff Long

"Fans of Dan Brown take note."—Jack Du Brul

"Deftly mixing history, science, and fiction, Napier keeps the action escalating..."—Publishers Weekly

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