The Lure Read Online Free PDF

man’s eyes in the mirror. They didn’t flicker.
    ‘No, he doesn’t. Sorry about that.’
    She laughed.
    ‘I’m Petrie. Tom, Tommy or Thomas depending on how you feel. From Dublin. So which part of Scandinavia are you from?’
    ‘Freya Størmer,’ she said, and they finally shook hands. ‘From north of the Arctic Circle. Tromsø, to be exact.’
    Petrie looked out uneasily at the fields and woods. In his imagination, he saw black bears roaming the forests. He wondered again what was bringing him out to these hinterlands. The trees looked black against the white snow and he had a brief, unsettling illusion of living inside a photographic negative.
    Patterns and planets. Planets and prime ministers. Don’t speak to strange women. A strange woman at his side. Beware of devouring lions.
    How do they connect? How?
    His new companion was smiling at some private joke. ‘You do planets. What exactly?’ Petrie asked.
    ‘At the moment? I’m part of ESA’s Darwin team.’
    ‘Darwin?’
    ‘A space-based interferometer. The European Space Agency are due to launch it next year. They’re big mirrors with a long baseline which should be able to make out gross features like continents on Earth-sized planets round the nearest stars.’
    ‘That’s still not quite exact.’
    ‘They want me to predict biological signatures for Darwin to search for.’ They were into a village and running a gauntlet of neat, small houses, each one managing to be different from the others.
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Like spectrum lines belonging to ozone or oxygen. Best seen in the ultraviolet. Oxygen is so reactive that if we see any at all on a planet there has to be biology at work producing it. Another…’
    Suddenly, heavy metal blasted their ears from eight speakers. Startled, Freya shook her head and shrugged, and by mutual consent they attempted no further conversation. The driver switched off the big car’s halogen beams.
    Presently the road, now covered with compacted snow, began to climb steeply through a forest. The driver switched the heavy rock off and concentrated on a series of hairpin bends. Petrie found that his ears were ringing. He was now shaking slightly, whether due to nervous anticipation, or the driving, or the aftermath of the ACDC explosion, he couldn’t say. On the next bend, the driver turned to the couple and said, ‘ Malé Karpaty, ’ in a cigarette-hoarse voice.
    The Little Carpathians. Dracula country. Petrie had a brief, movie-driven fantasy about isolated villages, Frankenstein monsters and grim, isolated castles.
    The road levelled, there was a little lodge house and cables stretching up into the mist, and then the mountain pass was plunging steeply and Petrie’s ears were popping with the swift change in altitude. At the foot of the pass the driver turned left on to a narrow lane.
    Petrie sensed that they were reaching journey’s end, realised that his fists were clenched with tension. By contrast, the young woman at his side seemed relaxed.
    Past a tiny ochre church with a thin green spire. Something massive, dimly glimpsed through the mist and then lost behind trees. Another climb, and then a long, gently curving road through open parkland. A final turn, and through the mist there emerged a castle with conical turrets and low battlements. To Petrie’s distraught imagination it looked like something out of a Bela Lugosi movie. The Dracula fantasies began to harden up.
    Petrie and Freya stood with their baggage while the driver did a swift U-turn and took his car back down the hill. They watched it until it had disappeared through the trees, and then turned their attention to the castle.
    Petrie knew nothing about castles or history but this one looked like some of the Austrian ones he had glimpsed in the distance on his drive from Vienna. He had a vague memory about the Hapsburg Dynasty and assumed that this had once been Austrian territory and that the castle dated from the eighteenth century. Two