“So basically you’re just a common thief,” Alex said. He knew he was treading close to the line, but he couldn’t resist needling McCain. “You’re planning to steal a lot of money.”
McCain nodded. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to be offended. “I am a thief. But not a common one at all. I am the greatest thief who ever lived. And I do not need to take the money. People give it to me willingly.”
“You said you were going to create a disaster.”
“I’m glad you were listening. That is exactly what I am going to do . . . or perhaps I should say it is exactly what I have done. What we have done. The disaster is already happening, even as we sit here in this pleasant night air.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.
“People need a reason to give money, and my genius, if you will forgive the word, has simply been to work out that the reason can be created, artificially. I can give you an example. A serious accident took place last year at the Jowada nuclear power station in Chennai, southern India. You may remember reading about it in the newspapers. That was a fairly simple matter, a bomb carried into the plant by one of my operatives. I have to say that the results were disappointing. The full force of the blast and the resulting radioactivity were contained and did less damage than I had hoped. But even so, First Aid was the first on the scene and received more than two million dollars in donations. Some of it, of course, we had to give away. We had to buy large quantities of some sort of antiradiation drug, and we had to pay for advertising. Even so, we made a tax-free profit of about eight hundred thousand dollars. It was a useful dress rehearsal for the event I was planning here, in Kenya. It also helped us with our operating costs.”
“And what are you planning here? What do you mean when you say I started it?”
“We’ll come back to you in a minute, Alex. But what I am planning here is a good old-fashioned plague. Not just in Kenya, but in Uganda and Tanzania too. I am talking about a disaster on a scale never seen before. And the beauty of it is that I am completely in control. But I don’t need to describe it to you. I can show you. I am, as you will see, one step ahead of the game.”
McCain opened his laptop computer and spun it around so that Alex could see the screen. “When the disaster begins, a few weeks from now, other charities will rush to the scene. In a sense, all charities are waiting for bad things to happen. It is the reason for their existence. We need to be faster than them. The first on the ground will scoop the lion’s share of the money. So we have already prepared our appeal . . .”
He pressed the Enter button.
A film began to play on the computer. Slowly, the camera zoomed in on an African village. At first, everything seemed normal. But then Alex heard the buzz of flies and saw the first dead bodies. A couple of cows lay on their sides with bloated stomachs and rigid, distended legs. The camera passed an eagle which seemed to have crash-landed, slamming into the dust. And at the same time, he heard a voice speaking in a soft, urgent tone.
“Something terrible is happening in Kenya,” the commentary began. “A dreadful plague has hit the land and nobody knows how it began. But people are dying. In the thousands. The oldest and the youngest have been the first to go . . .”
Now the camera had reached the first child, staring up with empty eyes.
“Animals are not immune. African wildlife is being decimated. This beautiful country is in the grip of a nightmare and we urgently need money, now, to save it before it’s too late. First Aid is running emergency food supplies. First Aid is already on the ground with vital medicine and fresh water. First Aid is funding urgent scientific research to find the cause of this disaster and to bring it to an end. But we cannot do it without you. Please send as much as you can today.
“Call us or visit our website. Our lines are open twenty-four hours a day. Save Kenya. Save the people. How can we ignore their cry for help?”
The final image showed a giraffe stretched out in the grass with part of its rib cage jutting through its side. A telephone number and a web address were printed over them with the First Aid logo below.
“I am particularly pleased with the giraffe,” McCain said. He tapped the keyboard and froze the picture. “Many people in the first world just look away when a child or an old woman dies in the street. But they’ll weep over a dead animal. A great many giraffes and elephants will die in Kenya in the next few months. It should double the amount we receive.”
Alex sat in silence. Everything that McCain was saying sickened him. But it was worse than that. He knew exactly what he was looking at. The African village on the screen. He had been there. He had stood in the same village when he had broken into the Elm’s Cross film studio. The only thing that was different was the backdrop. The green cyclorama was gone, replaced by swirling clouds and forest.
“You’ve made it all up,” he gasped. “It’s all fake. You built the village. It’s a set.”
“We were merely preparing ourselves for the reality,” McCain explained. “As soon as the first reports of the Kenyan plague hit the press, we will come forward with our television appeal. There will be advertisements in all the newspapers and on posters. This will happen not just in England but in America, Australia, another dozen countries. And then we will sit back and wait for the money to flood in.”
“And you’re going to keep it! You’re not going to help anyone!”
McCain smiled and blew smoke. “There’s nothing anyone can do,” he said. “Once the plague begins, there will be no stopping it. I can tell you that with certainty because, of course, I created it.”
“Greenfields . . .”
“Exactly. I wish my good friend Leonard Straik was here to explain the science of it, but I’m afraid he met with an accident and won’t be joining us. You could say he choked on a snail. Except the snail in question was the marbled cone variety and deadly poisonous. I have a feeling that Leonard’s heart had exploded before I forced it down his throat.”
So McCain had murdered Straik. Presumably, he didn’t want to share his profits with anyone. Alex filed the information away. He had to find a way to contact MI6.
“It works like this,” McCain explained. He was enjoying himself and he didn’t try to hide it. “You don’t seem to have spent a lot of time at school, Alex, but can I assume you’ve heard of genes? Every single cell in your body has about thirty thousand of them—and they are basically tiny pieces of code that make you what you are. The color of your hair, your eyes, and so on. It’s all down to the genes.
“Plants are made up of genes too. The genes tell the plant what to do . . . whether to taste nice or not, for example. Now, what Mr. Straik and his friends at Greenfields were doing was changing the nature of plants by effectively adding a single gene. Plants are more complicated than you might think. For example, the information required to make a single stalk of wheat would take up one hundred books with one thousand pages each. And here’s the remarkable thing. If you added just one paragraph of new information—the equivalent of an extra gene—you would change the entire library. Your wheat might still look like wheat, but it would be very different. It might not be quite so tasty, for example, if eaten with milk and sugar for breakfast. It might, in fact, kill you.
“Do you see where I’m going with this? I’m talking about taking something very ordinary and agreeable and turning it into something lethal. And this actually happens in every kitchen in the world almost every day of the week! Only, in reverse. Let me try to explain it to you.
“I’m sure you enjoy potatoes. Young boys like you eat them all the time . . . as chips or as fries. It probably never occurs to you that you are actually eating a poisonous plant. Not many people realize that the potato is closely related to deadly nightshade. Its leaves and flowers are extremely toxic. They won’t kill you, but they would make you very sick indeed. What you actually eat is the tuber, the bit that grows underground.
“The tubers, of course, are delicious—but they can also be made to harm you. If you lea
ve them out in the sun, even for one day, they turn green and taste bitter. If you eat them after that, you will be sick. And why has this happened? There’s a gene—a genetic switch—hidden inside the potato tuber. It’s completely harmless and almost invisible—but the sunlight seeks it out and turns it on. And once that happens, the potato tuber behaves differently. It goes green. It becomes poisonous. You have to throw it away.
“For the last five years, Greenfields Bio Center has been supplying seed to grow wheat in several African countries. The wheat has been genetically modified to need less water and to produce extra vitamins. But what nobody knows is that Leonard Straik used his particle delivery system to add an extra gene to the package. Like the potato gene I just told you about, it’s harmless. A loaf of Kenyan bread made out of home-grown Kenyan wheat will be fine. But once the genetic switch has been activated, although the wheat will look exactly the same, it will begin to change. It will quietly produce a toxin known as ricin. Ricin normally grows in castor beans and is one of the most lethal substances known to man. A tiny capsule of the stuff would kill an adult. And very soon it will be growing all over Africa.”
“That stuff I found in your office,” Alex muttered. “In the test tube . . .”
“You’re very quick,” McCain said. “The more I get to know you, Alex, the more I like you. Yes. That is our activating agent. It is a sort of mushroom soup. And this is very important. It’s not a chemical, it’s a living organism—which is to say it can reproduce itself.
“Again, I can explain this to you by taking you back to the kitchen. If you place an ordinary mushroom on a piece of paper and leave it overnight, you’ll notice a blackish sort of dust covering the surface the next day. What you are looking at are spores. If they are released outside, the spores will spread—a little bit like the common cold, traveling from one field to another. It may interest you to know that the Irish Potato Blight of 1845, which caused the death by starvation of almost a million people, was caused by a spore attacking the potato crop.
“I can see from your face that you’re beginning to understand the exact purpose of the flight that you took this morning. You were kind enough to help Dr. Beckett by pulling a lever inside the Piper Cub, and when you did this, you sprayed a single field of genetically modified wheat with the activating agent. Leonard Straik told me that it would take exactly thirty-six hours for the reaction to occur. So, at sunset tomorrow, the genetic switch will be thrown and the wheat in the field will begin to produce ricin. But that will only be the start of it. Once the spores have done their work, they will move on. The wind will carry them to the next field and to the one after that. Nothing will be able to stop them. Nothing will stand in their way.
“The birds will be the first to die. A little peck of poisoned wheat and they’ll look like the plastic eagle you saw in that film. Then it will be the turn of the people. It’s hard to believe that a loaf of bread in the local baker’s or wrapped in plastic on a supermarket shelf will contain enough poison to kill an entire family. But it will. It will have become a slice of death. Animals will die too. It will be as if God has passed judgment on the whole of Kenya.
“Except that it won’t stop at the borders. Greenfields has sold millions of seeds to the African people . . . in Uganda, Tanzania, and all around. Soon the contamination will have spread across the whole continent.”
“They’ll realize,” Alex said. “People will know that the wheat is poisoned and they’ll stop eating it. They’ll burn the fields.”
“That’s exactly right, Alex. It will all be over very quickly. It won’t even make a great economic difference to Kenya. They only grow 135,000 tons of wheat a year, and a lot of their food is imported. But that’s why First Aid has to act fast. It’ll be in the initial panic, the first weeks, that we’ll make our billions. First Aid will publicize the catastrophe to the world, and people will rush to give money without thinking. And what do you think they’ll do when they discover that it’s only the wheat that has mysteriously developed this sickness, that the plague can be contained? Do you think they’ll ask for their donations back? I don’t think so.
“And anyway, it will be too late. By then, I will have moved to Switzerland. I already have a new identity waiting for me. I will have plastic surgery . . . this time, I think, more successfully. I will reemerge as a slightly mysterious billionaire businessman, but I don’t think people will ask too many questions about who I am or where I’ve come from. I already discovered this when I was partying in politics. When you are rich, people treat you with respect.”
McCain fell silent. He had completed his explanation and sat back, almost exhausted, waiting for Alex to respond. There was a sudden hiss as one of the logs in the fire collapsed in on itself and a flurry of sparks leapt into the night air. The guards had disappeared from sight, but Alex knew they would be watching and would come in an instant if they were needed. He felt sick. It had been a final twist, a little act of extra cruelty to make him pull the lever that had released the spores. There had been no real reason for it. It was just how McCain and his fiancée got their kicks.
“So what happens next?” he asked. “What do you want with me?”
“Is that all you want to know? Haven’t you got anything to say about my plan?”
“I think your plan is as sick as you are, Mr. McCain. I’m not interested in it. I’m not interested in you. I just want to know why I’m here.”
Perhaps McCain had been expecting applause or at least some sort of reaction from Alex; he was clearly disappointed, and when he spoke, his voice was sullen. “Very well,” he said. “I might as well tell you.”
He had finished his second cigarette. He ground that out too.
“I have been thinking a great deal, Alex, about how you managed to cross my path on two occasions. The first time was at Kilmore Castle in Scotland. You were with the journalist Edward Pleasure. Why were you there?”
“I’m a friend of his daughter.” Alex couldn’t see any harm in admitting the truth. “He invited me.”
McCain considered for a moment. “Pure coincidence, then. Unfortunately for you, I was concerned about Pleasure,” he continued. “I had been warned that he might be dangerous and I wondered how much he knew about me. I only agreed to be interviewed by him because to have refused might have raised his suspicions. And then, when I heard the two of you talking about genetic engineering—”
“You thought he was talking about his article?” Alex almost wanted to laugh. “I was telling him about my homework! He’d asked me how I was doing at school!”
“I believe you, Alex. But at the time, I couldn’t take any chances. If Pleasure had found out about my involvement with Greenfields, he would have put this entire operation in jeopardy.”
“So you decided to kill him. You had one of your people shoot out his tire.”
“Actually, Myra did it for me. She was there too that night. Of course, there was a certain risk attached. But as I have already told you, I am something of a gambler. Perhaps that’s why I allowed myself to lose my temper when you managed to beat me at cards.”
He lifted a hand and waved. It was a signal. Two guards, both carrying rifles, began to approach the table. Beckett was with them.
“The first time we met may have been a coincidence,” McCain said. “The second time most definitely was not. You were sent to Greenfields by MI6. There is no point in attempting to deny it. You were carrying equipment that allowed you to jam the surveillance camera, and you also exploded a chimney on the recycling unit roof. It is therefore absolutely critical for me to discover how much the intelligence services know about me and in particular about this operation. In short, I need to know why you were at Greenfields. How much of my conversation with Leonard Straik did you overhear? What were you able to tell MI6?”
Alex was about to speak, but McCain held up a hand, stopping him. Beckett and the two guards had reached the table. They were standing behind Alex, waiting to escort him back to his tent.
“I do not want to hear any more from you tonight,” McCain said. “It is already clear to me that you are brave and intelligent. It is quite possible that you would be able to deceive me. So I want you to consider the questions I have asked you. I will ask them again in the morning.
“But the next time I put them to you, it will not be over a pleasant dinner.” McCain leaned forward, and Alex saw the ferocity in his eyes. “ ‘Behold, I have the keys of hell and death,’ as it says in the book of Revelation. Tomorrow, I intend to torture you, Alex. I want you to sleep tonight in the knowledge that when the sun rises, I am going to inflict terror on you such as you have never known in your life. I am going to strip you of your courage and your bravado so that when you open your mouth and speak to me, you will tell me everything I want to know and won’t even contemplate lying. Over this table, you have made some jokes at my expense, but you will not be making jokes when we meet again. You must be prepared to shed tears, Alex. Leave me now. And try to imagine, if you will, the horror that awaits you.”
Alex felt the two men grab hold of his arms. He shrugged them off and stood up.
“You can do what you like to me, Mr. McCain,” he said. “But your plan will never work. MI6 will find you and they’ll kill you. I expect they’re already on their way.”
“You’re right about one thing,” McCain replied. “I can do anything I like to you. And very soon I will. Good night, Alex. I’ll leave you to your dreams.”
Alex was taken away. The last thing he saw was Myra Beckett standing behind McCain, massaging his shoulders. McCain himself was leaning forward with his elbows on the table, his hands in front of his face. He looked very much as if he was at prayer.
20
PURE TORTURE
THE SUN ROSE ALL TOO SOON.
Barely able to sleep, Alex watched the sides of his tent turn gray, silver, then finally a dirty yellow as the morning light intensified. He had lost his watch and he had no idea of the time, but being so close to the equator, he suspected the sun was up early here. When would they come for him? Exactly what sort of torture did McCain have in mind?
Crocodile Tears Page 22