Simon Toyne - Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy - Sanctus, The Key, The Tower

‘What’s that thing?’ a red-faced man in his fifties asked in a blunt northern British accent. ‘That thing as looks like a cross?’

‘Well, as I’ve already mentioned, the Citadel has no crosses anywhere on its –’

He stopped short. Squinted against the brightening sky. Looked again.

There above him, clearly visible on the famously unadorned summit of the ancient fortress, was a tiny cross.

‘You know, I’m not … sure what that is …’ He trailed off again.

No one was listening anyway. They were all straining their eyes to get a better glimpse of whatever was perched on top of the mountain.

The guide followed suit. Whatever it was wavered slightly. It looked like a capital letter ‘T’. Maybe it was a bird, or simply a trick of the morning light.

‘It’s a man!’ Someone shouted from another group standing nearby. The guide looked across at a middle-aged man, Dutch by his accent, staring intently at the fold-out LCD screen of his video camera.

‘Look!’ The man leaned back so others could share his discovery.

The guide peered at the screen over the jostling scrum. The camera had been zoomed in as far as it would go and held unsteadily on a grainy, digitally enhanced image of a man dressed in what looked like a green monk’s habit. His long, dark-blonde hair whipped round his bearded face, blown by the higher winds, but he stood perfectly still at the summit’s edge, his arms fully outstretched, his head tilted down, looking for all the world like a human cross – or a lonely, living figure of Christ.

In the foothills rising to the west of Ruin, in an orchard first planted in the late Middle Ages, Kathryn Mann led a group of six volunteers silently across the dappled ground. Each member of the group was dressed identically in an all-over body smock of heavy white canvas with a wide-brimmed hat dripping black gauze on every shoulder and shading every face. In the early morning light they looked like an ancient sect of druids on their way to a sacrifice.

Kathryn arrived at an upright oil drum covered with a scrap of tarpaulin and began removing the rocks holding it in place as the group fanned out silently behind her. The buoyant mood that had filled the minibus as it threaded its way through the empty, pre-dawn streets had long since evaporated. She removed the last of the weights. Someone held up the smoker for her. Usually the warmer the day the more active the bees became, and the more she needed to subdue them. Despite the building heat, Kathryn could already tell this hive was the same as the others. No hum sounded inside it and the dry red brick that served as a landing pad was empty.

She pumped a few cursory puffs of smoke into the bottom of the hive then lifted the tarp to reveal eight wood battens spaced evenly across the rim of the open drum. It was a simple top-bar hive; they could be made out of almost any old bits of salvage, as this one had been. The expedition to the orchard had been intended as a practical demonstration of basic bee-keeping, something the volunteers could put into practice in the various parts of the world they would be stationed in for the next year. But as dawn had broken and hive after hive was found and checked, the expedition turned into a first-hand encounter with something much more disturbing.

As the smoke cleared Kathryn lifted a side batten carefully from the drum and turned to the group. Hanging beneath it was a large, irregular-shaped honeycomb almost empty of honey; the hive had been successful and prosperous until very recently. Now, despite a handful of newly hatched worker bees crawling aimlessly across its waxy surface, the hive was deserted.

‘A virus?’ a male voice asked from under one of the shrouds.

‘No.’ Kathryn shook her head. ‘Take a look …’

They formed a tight circle around her.

‘If a hive is infected by CPV or APV, chronic or acute bee paralysis virus, then the bees shiver and can’t fly so they die in or around the hive. But look at the ground.’

Six hats dipped and surveyed the spongy grass growing thickly in the shade of the apple tree.

‘Nothing. And look inside the hive.’

The hats rose, their wide brims pushing against each other.

‘If a virus had caused this then the bottom of the hive would be deep with dead bees. They’re like us; when they feel sick they head home and hunker down until they feel better. But there’s nothing there. The bees have just vanished. There’s something else here too.’

She held the batten higher and pointed at the lower section of the honeycomb where the hexagonal cells were covered with tiny wax lids.

‘Un-hatched larvae,’ Kathryn said. ‘Bees don’t normally abandon a hive if there are still young to be hatched.’

‘So what happened?’

Kathryn slotted the comb back into the silent hive. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But it’s happening everywhere.’ She began walking back to the boarded-up cider-house at the edge of the orchard. ‘Same thing’s been reported in North America, Europe, even as far east as Taiwan. So far no one’s managed to work out what’s causing it. The only thing everyone does agree on is that it’s getting worse.’

She pulled off her gauntlets as she reached the minibus and dropped them into an empty plastic crate. Everyone followed suit.

‘In America they call it Colony Collapse Disorder. Some people think it’s the end of the world. Einstein said that if the bee disappeared from the face of the earth then we’d only have four years left. No more bees. No more pollination. No more crops. No more food. No more man.’

She unzipped her gauze face protector and slipped off her hat revealing an oval face with pale, clear skin and dark, dark eyes. She had an ageless, natural air about her that was vaguely aristocratic and was regularly the object of the young male volunteers’ fantasies, even though she was older than many of their mothers. She reached up with her free hand, unclipped a thick coil of hair the colour of dark chocolate and shook it loose.

‘So what are they doing about it?’ The enquirer – a tall, sandy-haired boy from the American Mid-West – emerged from beneath a bee smock. He had the look most volunteers had when they first came to work for Kathryn at the charity: earnest, un-cynical, full of health and hope, shining with the goodness of the world. She wondered what he would look like after a year in the Sudan watching children die slowly from starvation, or in Sierra Leone persuading starving villagers not to plough fields their great-grandfathers had worked because guerrillas had sown them with landmines.

‘They’re doing lots of research,’ she said, ‘trying to establish a link between the colony collapses and GM crops, new types of nicotinoid pesticides, global warming, known parasites and infections. There’s even a theory that mobile phone signals might be messing around with the bees’ navigational systems, causing them to lose their bearings.’

She shrugged off her smock and let it fall to the ground.

‘But what do you think it is?’ Kathryn looked up at the earnest young man, saw the beginnings of a frown etching itself on to a face that had barely known a moment’s concern.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s a combination of all these things. Bees are actually quite simple creatures. Their society is simple too. But it doesn’t take much to upset things. They can cope with stress, but if life becomes too complex, to the point where they don’t recognize their society any more, maybe they abandon it. Maybe they’d rather fly off to their deaths than stay living in a world they no longer understand.’

She looked up. Everyone had stopped squirming out of their smocks and now stood with worried expressions clouding their young faces.