The Firemaker (47 page)

‘What for?’

‘I want you to go with me to the American Embassy. They won’t have anything to do with me.’ He chuckled sourly. ‘I guess I kind of burned my boats with the good old US of A. But they’ll believe you.’

‘Believe me about what?’

‘That they’re trying to kill me.’

Margaret was at a loss. ‘
Who
is trying to kill you?’

‘The same people that killed Chao Heng and those others. They’ll do anything to try and cover up.’ He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his neck and his forehead. His breath was coming now in short asthmatic bursts that wheezed and gurgled in his throat. ‘Though God knows what the point of it all is. They’re all going to die, the same as everyone else.’ There was something chilling in the way he spoke so glibly of death, raising goose bumps on Margaret’s arms. He glanced at her again, but couldn’t meet her eye for long. ‘I didn’t know anything about it. That’s the God’s honest truth. Not until that night at the duck restaurant. They sent a car for me. It was waiting outside. Took me to Zhongnanhai. You know what that is?’

‘The New Forbidden City.’

He nodded. ‘Where the bigwigs are.’ He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, sucking smoke deeply into his lungs through the crackling phlegm in his tubes. ‘Gave these things up years ago,’ he said. ‘But lately I thought what the hell.’ He took another draw. ‘The thing is, Chao was going to go public. You see, he had nothing to lose.’

Margaret shook her head. McCord was just rambling. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘Pang Xiaosheng,’ he said, stabbing his cigarette at her. ‘You heard of him?’

‘Vaguely.’ Margaret tried to remember. Something Bob had told her. ‘Minister of Agriculture. Sponsored your research into the super-rice.’

‘
Ex
Minister of Agriculture,’ McCord corrected her. ‘Future leader of China.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Or so he thought.’

Margaret was losing patience. ‘You’re still not making any sense, McCord.’

‘Oh, please,’ he said, turning towards her, an unpleasant sneer on his face, ‘call me Doctor. Even Mister. I’m not one to stand on ceremony.’

‘Look …’ She stopped and stood her ground. ‘Either you tell me what this is all about or I am going. Right now.’

‘Hey, cool it.’ He tipped his ash on the cobbles. ‘I’m coming to it, okay?’ They had reached the end of the corridor, and a cobbled slope led up through an arched gate to the temple beyond. A strange smile spread across McCord’s face. ‘Jeesus,’ he said. ‘Know where we are?’

‘In a park?’

He ignored the sarcasm in her tone. ‘Never even thought about it,’ he said. ‘Kind of ironic really. Come and see.’ And he headed up the ramp through the arch. She sighed and stood for a moment before following him, frustration bubbling up inside her. They emerged from the shadow of the gate into planes of shimmering silver marble, rising on three tiers to the blue-and-gold domes that rose, one on the other, more than a hundred and twenty feet into the Beijing sky. McCord wandered out across the paving stones towards the temple, the moon casting his shadow blue in his wake. He flicked his cigarette away, and it showered red sparks across the marble. He had suddenly become diminutive in the scale of things. He raised his arms on either side of himself like a bird and spun round to face her, grinning maniacally. ‘I feel washed in the light of heaven,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests.’ And he turned away again to tilt his head back and gaze up at the vast temple that loomed over him. He laughed out loud. ‘The Son of Heaven came here twice a year to pray. The first time was on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month to ask for a good harvest.’ He turned around again to face her, still grinning like an idiot, and she saw tears brimming in his eyes. ‘And then again at the winter solstice to give thanks for blessings received.’ And suddenly the grin vanished and he stepped towards her, tears running silently down his cheeks. ‘But Pang Xiaosheng didn’t have to pray for a good harvest. He had me to engineer one for him.’ He shook his head, and with bitterness in his voice said, ‘And he won’t be giving thanks for blessings received.’

Margaret stood stock still, absorbed by a performance that was both terrifying and sad, a tragedy played out on an ancient stage, a bizarre script performed by a grotesque clown. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened, Dr McCord?’ she asked quietly, in a voice that whispered back at them from among the terraces.

McCord seemed spent, and very small and insignificant in the shadow of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. ‘It was Chao Heng who set up the super-rice research programme for the Ministry of Agriculture. He was Pang’s man. And it was Chao who brought me in. That meant doing a deal with my employers, Grogan Industries. They were happy to put up the money, because Pang was in a hurry and they’d have a free hand. None of the interference they’d have got from government bodies in the States. The chance to put all their theories into practice on a grand scale. If it came off, they got the patent on the super-rice and the chance to sell it worldwide. Worth billions. Billions and billions. And the Chinese? Well, they’d just be happy because they could feed themselves, and Pang could sell himself as the man to lead them into the next millennium. And me? I was the man who was going to create the super-rice. And I did.’

He turned away, wandering off across the flagstones, talking at the night. ‘Jesus, it was so beautiful. A grain of rice impervious to insects or disease or fungus. Indestructible. Guaranteed one hundred per cent return from planting.’

‘How did you do it?’ Margaret asked.

He spun round, eyes gleaming. ‘How did I do it? It was easy. It was so simple it was perfection. I took a cholera toxin gene – you know, the stuff that makes cholera fucking lethal – and I put it in the rice.’

Margaret looked at him, horrified. ‘But that’s … insane.’

McCord shook his head, almost laughing at her shock. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘The cholera toxin killed everything. Insects, bacteria, viruses, fungi.’

‘And people?’

‘Well, that was the beauty of it. You cooked it, it was harmless, and the rice tasted every bit as good as it always had. But the really clever bit was getting it in there. Smart stuff, state of the art. But I told you all this.’ He waved his little finger at her. ‘Remember?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said dryly. ‘Your little penis.’

He grinned. ‘So I took my cholera toxin gene, stuck it on the back of a friendly virus, and sent it in to multiply in the DNA of the rice.’

‘A
friendly
virus?’ Margaret asked, unable to keep the scepticism from her voice.

He clouded. ‘Sure. In this case the cauliflower mosaic virus. Makes all those patterns on the leaves of a cauliflower. We’ve been eating it for thousands of years and it’s never done us any harm.’

‘So you thought it would be a good idea to feed people cholera toxin genes and cauliflower viruses when they thought they were eating rice?’

‘It worked. And it was perfectly harmless.’ McCord was almost aggressive in his defensiveness. ‘We had extensive field trials in the south. The research team lived on the stuff for a year before we ever went public with it. The returns were terrific and it tasted great.’ It was his turn to be sarcastic. ‘And no one died of cholera toxin or mosaic virus.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘So we launched it three years ago. All over China. The results were phenomenal, Dr Campbell. Phenomenal. Yields increased by up to a hundred per cent. Goodbye hunger.’

‘And hello profit.’

‘And why the hell not!’ McCord turned on her. ‘You put up the money, you take the risk, you reap the rewards.’

‘Why do I get the feeling there’s a “but” somewhere in our future?’ Margaret asked.

*

He gave her a sour look and took a couple of long pulls on his cigarette before he spoke again. ‘They never told me about Chao getting ill. Nearly a year ago. At first they thought it was AIDS. He liked boys, you know.’ He wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘They were treating him for AIDS, but it wasn’t that, and they started getting worried, and Pang had him admitted to Military Hospital Number 301.’ He stood staring at the ground, breathing stertorously, as if he had been running. ‘It was some new fucking virus no one had seen before. A retrovirus. Lies dormant in the brain for five years or more. You don’t even know it’s there. Then for no reason it decides it’s going to screw you. Starts attacking the white blood cells and ends up completely fucking your immune system. Bit like AIDS, only worse. And harder to pin down, ’cos it mutates faster than you can say “Gotcha”.’ He dragged his eyes up to meet hers and held them for a long moment before the truth suddenly dawned on her.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘It’s in the rice.’ And the hair rose upon the back of her neck and along her arms and on her thighs.

His eyes filled up again and he flicked his cigarette vindictively at the night. ‘Somehow,’ he said, ‘somewhere along the line, our innocent little cauliflower mosaic virus recombined with another virus, probably something equally innocuous somewhere out there in the test environment.’ He paused to catch his breath, coming now in increasingly short bursts. ‘And we got a mutation. A third and, this time, lethal virus. RiceX Virus they’re calling it. RXV. Inherent in the genetic make-up of the rice. We never even knew it was there.’

There was a long silence as Margaret absorbed what he had just told her. She was aware of the blood pulsing behind her eyes, in her throat, in the pit of her stomach. She felt sick. ‘You mean it’s still there in the rice?’ she asked eventually. He nodded. ‘The stuff that people are growing and eating?’ He nodded again. ‘And anyone who eats it has got, or is going to get, this virus … this RXV?’

He dragged his eyes away from his feet for a moment to stare off into the trees. His voice was trembling. ‘Of course, it won’t show itself for another couple of years yet. Chao was eating it long before it went into production.’

Margaret simply found herself unable to deal with the scale of what he was saying. ‘But that’s more than a billion people,’ she gasped.

He shrugged. ‘More than that. They’ve been exporting super-rice all over the world. And once the virus is out there, who knows how else it’s transmitted? We could be looking at half the world’s population or more.’

And in that moment, Margaret was struck by the sickening realisation that she, too, had eaten the rice. For a moment she simply couldn’t believe it. There had to be a mistake, some way of undoing it. She couldn’t be going to die just because she’d eaten some rice. It was like the moment she had heard that Michael was dead. She couldn’t accept it. It just didn’t seem possible. She wheeled round on McCord, fear turning to anger turning to rage.

‘You fucking people!’ she screamed at him, her voice echoing back from every marble surface and rising into the hot pine-scented night. ‘You stupid fucking people! What nature took three
billion
years to achieve, you thought you could do in three. You thought you could play fucking God!’

McCord flinched, but he did not speak for a long time. ‘Irony is,’ he said finally, ‘I haven’t eaten rice since I was a kid. Got an allergic reaction to the stuff.’

Margaret was riven between despair and anger. She wanted to fly at him, punching and kicking and tearing at his face. But her despair robbed her of strength and she stood helplessly in the night, crushed and burdened by the weight of what she knew – that she had eaten death and there was no way back; that before she died she would see two billion people, maybe more, die ahead of her; that there was nothing she could do about any of it.

Hot, salty tears filled her eyes, blurring and distorting the image of McCord in front her. ‘Why are they even bothering to try and cover it up?’ she asked hopelessly. ‘What’s the point?’

‘Because they’re scared and they’re stupid,’ he said. ‘Grogan figured if they could keep it under wraps, they’d have two years to unearth a cure before they got found out.’

‘They’re mad!’

‘That’s what I told them. Jesus Christ, the world’s been searching for a cure for AIDS for nearly two decades, and they think they’re going to find a cure for RXV in two years?’ He snorted his derision. ‘But Pang Xiaosheng went along with it, basically ’cos he’d got no fucking choice. Soon as the Chinese government finds out what he’s done he’s a dead man. And Chao … well, Chao was dying already, and he was going to tell the world. So Grogan brought in this pro from Hong Kong. Some Triad hit-man who was going to be invisible in China, they thought. He took care of Chao and reckoned he’d destroyed the evidence by setting him on fire. And then you came along and started cutting him up and asking for blood tests. It was all getting out of hand …’

Through all her emotions – of self-pity, of horror and shock – her brain was sending tiny alarm signals to her conscious mind. She forced herself to stop and think and focus. She stared at him, and he became discomfited. ‘What are you fucking staring at?’ he demanded accusingly.

‘Those gates into the park shouldn’t have been open, should they? This time of night, they should have been all locked up.’ Her mind was racing now. She looked around. Great red doors with gold studs closed off all the gates on to the marble terrace, except for the one through which they had come from the corridor. She stabbed a finger towards it. ‘That should have been locked, too, shouldn’t it?’ Maybe she didn’t have five years to live. Maybe she didn’t even have five minutes. She wheeled round on him. ‘You never wanted me to go to the American Embassy with you, did you?’ How could she have been so stupid? ‘You bastard, you set me up! That’s why you’ve been telling me all this, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter that I know. Because you’re going to kill me.’

He took a step towards her. ‘They made me do it,’ he said, his jowls trembling, his eyes black and scary now. ‘They said just to get you here. It was me or you. And, hey, you’re going to die anyway.’

‘We’re all going to die some time,’ she said bitterly.

He took another step towards her.

She stepped back. ‘Don’t you come fucking near me,’ she hissed at him.