Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower

‘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.

‘Hey,’ Kathryn said, trying to lighten the mood, ‘don’t listen to me; I just spend too much time on Wikipedia. Besides, you saw it’s not happening to all the hives; more than half of them are buzzing fit to burst. Come on,’ she said, clapping her hands together and immediately feeling like a nursery teacher leading a bunch of five-year-olds in a sing-song. ‘Still got lots to do. Pack away your smocks and start breaking out the tools. We need to replace those dead hives.’ She flipped the lid off another plastic crate lying on the grass. ‘There’s everything you need in here. Tools, instructions on how to make a basic top-bar hive, bits of old boxes and lengths of timber. But remember, in the field you’ll be building hives from whatever you can scavenge. Not that you’ll find much lying around where you’ll be going. People who don’t have anything in the first place don’t tend to throw anything away.

‘You can’t use anything from the dead hives. If some kind of spore or parasite did cause the colony to fail, you’ll just import disaster to the new one.’

Kathryn pulled open the driver’s door. She needed to distance herself from the volunteers. Most of them came from educated, middle-class backgrounds, which meant they were well-meaning but impractical and would stand around discussing the best way of doing something for hours rather than actually doing it. The only way to cure them was to throw them in at the deep end and let them learn by their own mistakes.

‘I’ll check how you’re doing in half an hour. If you need me, I’ll be in my office.’ She slammed the door shut behind her before anyone could ask another question.

She could hear the dull clatter of tools being sorted and the first of many theoretical discussions. She turned on the radio. If she could hear what they were talking about, sooner or later the mother in her would compel her to assist and that wouldn’t help anybody. She wouldn’t be there for them in the field.

A local radio station drowned out the noise of the volunteers with traffic news and headlines. Kathryn reached over to the passenger seat and picked up a thick manila file. On the cover was a single word – Ortus – and the logo of a four-petal flower with the world at its centre. It contained a field report detailing a complex scheme to irrigate and replant a stretch of desert created by illegal forest clearances in the Amazon Delta. She had to decide today whether the charity could afford it or not. It seemed that every year, despite fundraising being at an all-time high, there were more and more bits of the world that needed healing.

‘And finally,’ the radio newscaster said with that slightly amused tone they always reserve for novelty items at the end of the serious stuff, ‘if you go down to the centre of Ruin today you’re sure of a big surprise – because somebody dressed as a monk has managed to climb to the top of the Citadel.’

Kathryn glanced up at the slim radio buried in the dashboard.

‘At the moment we’re not sure if it’s some kind of publicity stunt,’ the newscaster continued, ‘but he appeared this morning, shortly after dawn, and is now holding his arms out to form some kind of a … a human cross.’

Kathryn’s insides lurched. She turned the keys in the ignition and jammed the minibus into gear. She drew level with one of the volunteers and wound down her window.

‘Got to go back to the office,’ she called. ‘Be back in about an hour.’

The girl nodded, her face registering mild abandonment anxiety, but Kathryn didn’t see it. Her eyes were already fixed ahead, focusing on the gap in the hedge where the track fed out on to the main road that would take her back to Ruin.

10

Halfway between the gathering crowds and the Citadel’s summit, the Abbot, tired from a night spent awaiting further news, sat by the glowing embers of the fire and looked at the man who had just brought it.

‘We had thought the eastern face to be insurmountable,’ Athanasius said, his hand smoothing his pate as he finished his report.

‘Then we have at least learned something tonight, have we not?’ The Abbot glanced over at the large window, where the sun was beginning to illuminate the antique panes of blue and green. It did nothing to lighten his mood.

‘So,’ he said at length, ‘we have a renegade monk standing on the very summit of the Citadel, forming a deeply provocative symbol, one which has probably already been seen by hundreds of tourists and the Lord only knows who else, and we can neither stop him nor get him back.’

‘That is correct.’ Athanasius nodded. ‘But he cannot talk to anyone whilst he remains up there, and eventually he must climb down, for where else can he go?’

‘He can go to hell,’ spat the Abbot. ‘And the sooner that happens, the better for us all.’

‘The situation, as I see it, is this …’ Athanasius persisted, knowing from long experience that the best way to deal with the Abbot’s temper was simply to ignore it. ‘He has no food. He has no water. There is only one way down from the mountain, and even if he waits for the cover of night the heat-sensitive cameras will pick him up as soon as he gets below the uppermost battlements. We have sensors on the ground and security on the outside tasked to apprehend him. What’s more, he is trapped inside the only structure on earth from which no one has ever escaped.’

The Abbot shot him a troubled glance. ‘Not true,’ he said, stunning Athanasius into silence. ‘People have escaped. Not recently, but people have done it. With a history as long as ours it is … inevitable. They have always been captured, of course, and silenced – in God’s name – along with everyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with them during their time outside these walls.’ He noticed Athanasius blanch. ‘The Sacrament must be protected.’

The Abbot had always considered it regrettable that his chamberlain did not possess the stomach for the more complex duties of their order. It was why Athanasius still wore the brown cassock of the lesser guilds rather than the dark green of a fully ordained Sanctus. Yet so zealous was he, and dedicated to his duty, that the Abbot sometimes forgot he had never learned the secret of the mountain, or that much of the Citadel’s history was unknown to him.

‘The last time the Sacrament was threatened was during the First World War,’ the Abbot said, staring down at the cold grey embers of the fire as if the past was written there. ‘A novice monk jumped through a high window and swam the moat. That’s why it was drained. Fortunately he had not been fully ordained so did not yet know the secret of our order. He made it as far as Occupied France before we managed to … catch up with him. God was with us. By the time we found him the battlefield had done our job for us.’

He looked back at Athanasius.

‘But that was a different time, one when the Church had many allies, and silence could easily be bought and secrets simply kept; before the Internet enabled anyone to send information to a billion people in an instant. There is no way we could contain an incident like that today. Which is why we must ensure it does not happen.’

He looked back up at the window, now fully lit by the morning sun. The peacock motif shone a vibrant blue and green – an archaic symbol of Christ, and of immortality.

‘Brother Samuel knows our secret,’ the Abbot said simply. ‘He must not leave this mountain.’

11

Liv pressed the buzzer and waited.

The house was a neat new-build in Newark, a few blocks back from Baker Park and close to the state university where the man of the house, Myron, worked as a lab technician. A low picket fence marked the boundaries of each neighbouring plot and ran alongside the single slab pathways to every door. A few feet of grass separated them from the street. It was like the American dream in miniature. If she’d been writing a different kind of piece she would have used this image, conjured something poignant from it; but that wasn’t why she was here.