Frontend Pager

Hi all,
i would like to build an advanced Pager for the WordPress frontend.
It should display in a googe like style all available pages ( just like in the admin area of wordpress).

The problem is, i need to find out how many posts can be queried for the current request. The $wp_query seems not to provide a variable containing the overall count.

Any ideas? If seen wordpress installations with such pagers but didn’t find any plugins nor code examples about this topic.

thx in advance