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  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

  For Bruce, Ailsa, Hazel and Jim.

  Acknowledgements

  In writing this novel I have benefited from many discussions with colleagues, friends and family. Dr Anna Gavin helped me with matters medical and biochemical; Martin Murphy advised me on computer matters; Tigran Khanzadyan and Georgi Pavlovski helped me with Russian, as did my son Bruce with Norwegian. Dr Peter Herring gave me insights into the mysterious glowing wheels sometimes reported at sea: the cited reports are from the logbooks, deposited in the Met Office, of numerous trained observers in the Voluntary Observing Fleet. I am indebted to the Met Office for permission to quote them and to Sir Arthur C. Clarke for pointing out that this strange luminescence has been given the evocative name ‘Wheels of Poseidon’. The lyrics in Café Roland are from The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. I am especially grateful to my wife Nancy who assisted me in countless practical ways, not least in photography at various locations used in the book.

  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 gun-metal 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 a
nother 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.

  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.’