Decipher [Paperback]

From its opening disaster in the oilfields of Antarctica through its escalating scenes of destruction and discovery, Stel Pavlou's novel Decipher keeps the tension mounting. Inevitably, readers care quite a lot about thrillers involving the entire destruction of the world in which we live, but Pavlou also makes us care for his characters, living through gravity waves and solar flares and trying to do something about them. Many of the ideas in his plot will be familiar to those of us who have read the alternative archaeology of writers such as Graham Hancock--the lost civilisation before the dawn of history, the uncannily accurate archaic maps, the secret chambers below famous religious monuments. However, there is considerably more to Pavlou than just wide reading effectively recycled--his evocation of the chillingly cold or the deeply strange, for example, and his understanding of both the human drive to greedy evil and the human capacity for self-sacrifice. Scott, passionate student of ancient languages, and Sarah, brilliant young geologist, are uncomplicatedly virtuous characters and rather refreshingly so; Pavlou's sense of the dangerousness of a universe with which humans greedily tinker without understanding it is balanced by a sense of the other things of which humans are capable. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

There is a signal emanating from deep within the ice of Antarctica. Atlantis has awoken. Ancient monuments all over the world - from the Pyramids of Giza, to Mexico, to the ancient sites of China - are also awakening, reacting to a brewing crisis not of this earth, connecting to each other in some kind of ancient global network. A small group of scientists is assembled to attempt to unravel the mystery. What they discover will change the world. Imagine that 12,000 years ago it really did rain for 40 days and 40 nights. That storms reigned supreme. Imagine that survivors of human civilization really were forced to take to boats or hide out in caves on mountaintops. Then consider that these same myths from around the world predict this kind of devastation will occur time and again. What could cause such a catastrophe? What occurs in nature with such frightening and predictable regularity? A pulsar. But this is not just any pulsar - the ordinary type that pulses once a second, a minute, or even a week. This pulses once every 12,000 years and sends out a gravity wave of such ferocity it beggars belief. Not only that, it's closer than anybody has ever imagined. For it lives in our own backyard. It is the Sun.

I had more fun working on DECIPHER with Stel Pavlou than pretty much anything else I've done in the fifteen years I have worked in publishing. He's a writer whose ideas are non-stop, and whose dialogue is wonderful. Like some other recent writers of terrific thrillers, he appeals to the paying public, not always to critics who disappear up their own fundaments!!! Rock on, Stel.

THE GREAT BOOK AND FILM SWINDLE by Stel Pavlou

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon and I’d just come in from signing on the dole, feeling well and truly sorry for myself. But that day I was to embark on a journey that would result in my first novel, Decipher, and my first screenplay, The 51st State, being bought virtually the same month. One telephone call was about to change my life forever.

“Hi, this is Tim Roth,” the voice on the phone announced. Yes, the Tim Roth, of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction fame. “I really liked your script.” I immediately knew that this man was either a nutter or a wind-up merchant. Clearly there was only one way to deal with this. “Sod off,” I growled.

OK, my entry into the film business could have gone better. But it was an entry nonetheless and it is inextricably linked to my entry into publishing. I had sent my script to Tim Roth and he’d read it. Ultimately he had absolutely nothing to do with the finished film, but he’d decided to associate himself with something I’d written. What he did that day was lend me legitimacy.

I was in my final year at University when I got an idea for my book, but I didn’t know how to write it. And it was while trying to work out how to write that book, I came up with the idea for a film. I had no reason to suppose these things would actually come to pass. I had no training in the entertainment business, no training as a writer, no contacts, and no relations or convenient marriages to draw upon. Mum was a Carer for Social Services. Dad was retired. And I had a more immediate concern: I couldn’t get a job.

I applied for over 600 jobs in six months when I left Liverpool. I got one interview. And I didn’t get that job. It got to the point where one female friend applied for the same job as me under her name, but with my exact CV, she got an interview, I didn’t. Eventually all that was left was bitter anger directed towards a degree that wasn’t getting me a job. American Studies. Why had I bothered?

So the conception of Decipher came about purely by chance. I’d been reading Revelations, the whacko chapter in the Bible about the end of the world, and - for a change of pace - start reading some Plato. As you do. In reality this too was born of poverty. I love to read but at the time couldn’t afford any books. A second-hand bookshop down the road had Plato for sale for 50p and the Bible, well they were having a hard time giving them away.

Have you ever noticed that the holy city in Revelations bears a striking similarity to Atlantis as described by Plato? That was my big discovery of the week, and that, in a nutshell, was how Decipher was born. An action adventure story about how six scientists discover Atlantis and realize the end of the world is coming – and the key to stopping it lies in the scriptures of a myriad of religions dotted around the world.

Pretty quickly I knew that I couldn’t blag my way through this one – it was going to require some research. So, at the height of unemployment, I set to work on a book and a film, and prayed to God I would find a job.

Threshers came about by accident. A little while after Tim Roth had phoned, my brother was walking past Threshers when one of the assistants leaned out and offered him a job. He didn’t want it – but he knew a man who did.

It would be something to tide me over, I thought. In the end I stayed there nearly four years. But there was the opportunity to work overtime and the hours were flexible. Which was handy because, armed with my script, and financed through some friends’ generosity, I was going to Cannes.

The details are long and convoluted, and involve a certain degree of, shall we say, artful misrepresentation, but in the end, I got there. This period of my life is best summed up by something I read that Francis Ford Coppola had said, and it was this: If you tell enough people enough times that you’re making a movie, pretty soon it’s treated as fact and becomes real. And do you know what? He’s right.

Again, what about Decipher? During all this I quietly got on and wrote my book. In 1997, I’d written the first 100 pages of what would turn out to be an initial 800-page manuscript. I showed it to a few people and they seemed interested. 1997 was also the year I got my first agents both in London and the US. Before the film deal nobody would take my calls, now I’d pulled this off, doors were slowly opening.

At the same time, back in London my novel was just starting to be sent out to the publishers.

And then the strangest thing started to happen. A local journalist was inspired by the story and started pumping out articles about my imminent success. Then the nationals got interested. Soon, articles were surfacing about how great the book was, and these were sent to the studio. And vice versa, despite the fact there was no guarantee that there was even going to be a movie, articles about how good it was started surfacing and these were sent to the publishers.

In November 1999, in the space of four weeks Decipher was bought in a two-book deal for six figures. And The 51st State was finally bought outright by Alliance Atlantis, again for a six-figure deal.

I thought I’d blagged my way to success, but John Jarrold, my editor at Simon and Schuster, told me, “Sorry, mate, you’ve written a terrific book. Live with it.” --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Stel Pavlou lives in Kent. He has worked in various jobs, received a degree in American Studies and written the script for the film THE 51ST STATE, starring Samuel L Jackson and Robert Carlyle. Visit www.stelpavlou.com

Charlie was focused on his monitors. Clicked the mouse a couple of times. When his gaze met Matheson’s it was worried. ‘We got a warship. Chinese.’
Charlie had the Global Positioning System, or GPS, on line and was busy monitoring air and sea traffic. GPS kept track of the position of every vehicle linked into its network of satellites. Those vehicles could access all kinds of navigational data, including pinpointing all the other vehicles plugged into it, anywhere on earth, at any given time. It had been developed by the US military sometime in the last century. Now it was an everyday part of civilian life.
Clearly a Chinese warship was bad news. There was every chance now they would have to dump the pipeline and move on quickly. Red Osprey had a distinct advantage over the warship in that, thanks to some bright young computer programmer, it didn’t actually register on any GPS system. At a distance, Red Osprey was to all intents and purposes invisible. But if they were found, they would be boarded.
Matheson had seen the news. He knew what was going on and it wasn’t good. Red Osprey was flying the US flag. To the Chinese right now that was a red rag to a bull. ‘Is this what Bulger came down to see me about?’ Matheson snapped, agitated. He didn’t need this right now.
‘Yeah. He thought maybe they could hear what we’re doing in the water.’
‘And can they? Charlie, I need to know. My ass is on the line here.’
‘No, man! No way they could hear us. You did good.’
‘I did good? I did good? I did a goddamn miracle, Charlie. Next to loaves and fishes, bringing this project forward six months was a goddamn, honest to goodness miracle. How do you know they can’t hear us?’ Matheson was working himself into a sweat.
‘I know they can’t hear us, coz I’ve been listenin’ to them on the radio for a half hour. Man, they too busy partying to be bothered snooping around for us. They’ve been hanging around all morning watching our guys over at McMurdo preparing a new landing strip. They’re too distracted. Shit, I can hear somebody over there singin’ Abba – in Chinese.’
Matheson frowned in surprise.
‘What can I say,’ Charlie shrugged. ‘The node’s got great ears.’
‘What song?’
‘“Supertrooper”.’
If Red Osprey were discovered it would blow the whole situation. They’d already had one close encounter with a wing of Chinese fighters out on patrol. They hadn’t been discovered, but with Chinese and US forces facing off over mineral rights, in a world where dwindling fossil fuels were sending prices skyward, Red Osprey’s surreptitious oil tapping could spark a war.
Bulger had been bugging him about friction vibration for weeks. It was what they had been most concerned about. Screw whether it actually worked. Just make sure the damn thing didn’t make any noise.
The ‘damn thing’ was the heart of Matheson’s design, a device called the Depth Node. It had been transported out to the Ross Sea under cover of darkness last winter and dumped directly beneath them. Then, controlled remotely, it had dug in on the sea floor. It was the main point for capping the well and heating the buried pipe-work. The node was what made polar oil exploration possible and the company intended to set up nodes all over the Antarctic coast. Drill, strike oil, then cap off, only returning to a node when they wanted to fill a tanker. Refining was done aboard ship. The node would take care of everything else. Its power unit ran on hydrogen and oxygen – essentially water – and was designed to last twenty years. But the prototype had only been in the ground for nine months. It was supposed to run silently. What if it had failed?
Water power was a new technology which Rola Corp. had acquired the patent to about fifteen years previously and sat on. So far, the rival water-powered generators that had emerged onto the market were so extremely expensive only western nations could afford them. Which was good because it meant it would be decades before the Third World could scrape together enough cash to buy the technology. Until then, they would need oil. The problem was, there had been no mass testing of this new technology. What if there was a problem with the water-powered section of the node, something beyond Matheson’s predicting capabilities and the Chinese had detected this? They were a sitting duck.
Charlie handed Matheson a mug of coffee as he watched the screens. Absorbed, as if he were playing a game. ‘What’s that?’ Matheson asked, pointing to a series of blips.
‘That red one’s the Chinese sub. The other’s a US carrier. And that there, see that blue one? That’s a plane on its way from Chile to Pirrit Hills, in the Chilean sector. And I can tell you right now, they’s up shit creek without a paddle.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s a small aircraft,’ Charlie explained. ‘That storm we got moving in just fucked up their day. They’re past the point of no return. They’re going to have to find somewhere to land and refuel if they’re going to get back. And between you and me, I don’t think they’re even gonna make it to their fuel dump.’
‘What do we do? Charlie, we can’t just let them crash! What if it was us out there?’
‘We can’t just get on a radio, either. We’re not supposed to be here, Ralph.’
‘I know, but – look, see? The two closest research stations to Pirrit Hills are both American. Siple, and Sky-Hi – y’know, Eights Station. They’re both manned. Charlie, you gotta send out an emergency message – on the Internet at least. Just make sure they’re anonymous.’
‘If I send out any message, they’ll know somebody’s out here,’ Charlie said defensively.
‘You gotta do something,’ Matheson argued, distressed.
‘I’m sorry, but they’re on their own.’
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.