The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  Li climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. ‘Most of the technology for the super-rice was developed at Zhuozhou agro hi-technology development region, just south of Beijing. After that they spent a number of years in the south near Guilin in Guangxi province conducting field trials. That’s where Chao was before returning to Beijing to be appointed adviser to the Minister of Agriculture.’

  Margaret was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Could you show me Chao’s flat?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ve already been through it from top to bottom.’

  ‘I know … I’d just like to look for myself.’ She looked at him very directly. ‘Indulge me. Please?’

  He looked at the appeal in those palest of blue eyes and knew that he couldn’t resist. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  She checked her watch. ‘Just after four.’

  ‘Okay. I have to go to the railway station first to pick up tickets for my uncle. Then we’ll go to Chao’s flat.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  Wednesday Evening

  The traffic on the second ring road heading south was nose to tail, crawling through a late afternoon haze of humidity and pollution. Li took a pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  Margaret looked at the cigarettes with distaste. ‘Actually, yes.’ Then she relented. ‘Well, I guess if you open your window …’

  ‘Then the air-conditioning won’t work.’ He dropped the pack back in the glove compartment. ‘In China,’ he said, ‘it is considered bad manners to refuse someone permission to smoke.’

  ‘Then why did you ask?’

  ‘I was being polite.’

  ‘Well, in the States it’s considered impolite to ask somebody else to breathe your smoke.’

  He smiled. ‘We’re never going to agree on very much, are we?’

  ‘Well, there’s certainly room for improvement on our record to date.’

  He blasted his horn at a yellow taxi and switched lanes to gain a couple of car lengths. ‘So what happened that night?’ he asked.

  ‘What night?’

  ‘The night of your banquet.’

  ‘What, with McCord?’ He nodded. ‘The guy’s a total creep.’

  ‘So why did you invite him?’

  ‘What?’ She was shocked. ‘Where in the hell did that story come from?’

  ‘I thought you knew him.’

  ‘He tried to pick me up in the bar of the Friendship. I’d never seen him before then. It was Lily who told him we were going to a welcome banquet, and he just turned up.’ She gave vent to her indignation. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘But you got into a fight with him.’

  ‘I didn’t get into a fight with him. I took issue with the work he does.’

  Li was surprised. ‘But he’s a scientist.’

  ‘He’s a biotechnologist. He tampers with the genetic make-up of foods and then expects us to eat them.’

  ‘He was responsible for developing the super-rice. What’s wrong with that? It’s feeding millions of hungry people.’

  ‘Of course that’s the argument scientists use in its favour.’ She stopped herself. One step at a time, she thought. ‘Do you know what genetic engineering is?’

  He shrugged, reluctant to admit his ignorance. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘And do you know why you don’t?’ He didn’t. ‘Because a lot of scientists think that we laymen are too stupid to understand it. In fact it’s really very simple. But they don’t want to explain, because if we understood it we might just be scared of it.’

  He glanced at her across the Jeep. ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘I lived with it for nearly seven years.’ And she remembered Michael’s earnest passion which she had shared, infected by his commitment and enthusiasm. It was strange, she thought now, how that passion lived on in her still, while all feeling for Michael had withered and died.

  He recognised the same bitterness he had seen in her at the Sichuan restaurant, and it came back to him that she had told him her husband lectured in genetics. He knew that somehow he had touched on the same raw nerve, then and now. ‘So explain it to me,’ he said.

  ‘You know what DNA is?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘It’s just a code. A sequence of genes that determines the nature of all living things – their substance, their characteristics. So, suppose you grow tomatoes, and all your tomatoes are being destroyed by a certain type of caterpillar. What do you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Spray them with an insecticide, I guess, to kill the caterpillar.’

  ‘That’s what people have been doing for years. Trouble is, it contaminates the food, it contaminates the environment, and it costs a lot of money. But now you discover that a certain type of potato you are growing is never attacked by these caterpillars. In fact, they positively avoid it. And you find out that the reason for this is that the potato, in its genetic code, has a gene that creates a substance that is poisonous to the caterpillar. So, says your friendly neighbourhood genetic engineer, here’s the solution to your tomato problem. You take the gene that creates the poison in the potato and insert it into the DNA of the tomato. And, bingo, suddenly you’ve got a tomato that the caterpillars will avoid like the plague.’

  ‘It sounds like a pretty good idea.’

  ‘Of course it does. But hold it in your head for the moment. Because you’ve got another problem with your tomatoes. They ripen too fast. By the time you’ve picked them, packed them and shipped them to the shops they’re starting to go rotten. So along comes the genetic engineer, by now your very close friend, and says he has identified the gene in the DNA of your tomato that makes it shrivel and rot. He tells you he can remove the gene, modify it, and put it back in so that the tomato will ripen later on the vine and stay fresh for weeks, even months. Problem solved.’

  Traffic had ground to a halt. Li leaned on the wheel and looked at her. ‘I thought you were trying to sell me the idea that genetic engineering was a bad thing.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying that the idea in itself might not have some virtue. I’m saying that the current practice of it could be disastrous.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, you think you’ve just created the perfect tomato. It is impervious to caterpillars, it’s got a long shelf-life in the shops, and you’ve saved a fortune on pesticides. But then the technology doesn’t come cheap. The company which employs the genetic engineer has spent millions on research and development, and they’re going to pass these costs on to you. And it’s not just a one-off cost, because the genetically engineered DNA is not passed on in the seeds. You have to buy them every year.

  ‘Then you find that the poison that was innocuous to humans in the potato has combined with another substance in the tomato to create something that thousands of people have an allergic reaction to. Some of them die. And modifying that gene to slow down the ripening and rotting? It’s ruined the taste. So even if your customers don’t have an allergic reaction to your tomatoes, they don’t like the taste of them. You’re ruined.’

  She grinned at the expression on his face. ‘But do you know what else? In moving these genes about, the geneticists used another gene that had nothing to do with either the potato or the tomato. They call it a “marker” gene. All it does is allow them to check up quickly and easily on the results of moving the other genes about. But this gene was taken from a bacterium which just happened to be resistant to an antibiotic widely used in the treatment of killer diseases in humans. So what’s happening now? The people who eat your tomatoes, who don’t die of an allergic reaction, become resistant to certain types of antibiotic and start dying from diseases that have been under control for decades.’

  He stared at her in disbelief. ‘But surely the tomato would have been tested first? These problems would have been seen and they would have stopped growing them.’ A symphony of horns sounded behind them. The traffic had moved on and Li had not. He
slipped the Jeep hurriedly in gear and lurched forward.

  ‘You would think so, wouldn’t you?’ said Margaret. ‘But the companies that put up the cash for research and development want their money back. And the scientists who developed the technology are so arrogant they believe that a technology which is only a dozen or so years old can replace an ecological balance that nature took three billion years to arrive at.

  ‘So they are all prepared to ignore the evidence, or deny it exists. I mean, there’s already been one genetically engineered soybean found to cause severe allergic reactions in people who’ve eaten it. Then there was a bacterium genetically modified to produce large amounts of a food supplement that killed thirty-seven people and permanently disabled another fifteen hundred in the United States.

  ‘Crops that have been genetically modified to resist herbicides and pesticides can pass on that resistance through cross-pollination, creating “super-weeds” that simply beat the original crop hands down in the fight for space in the soil.

  ‘Hey, and do you know what else … ?’ Her nose wrinkled in disgust as she thought about it. ‘They’re now taking genes out of animals and fish and putting them into plants. A potato with chicken genes in it to increase resistance to disease. Lovely if you’re a vegetarian. Tomatoes with genes from a flounder – can you believe it! – to help reduce freezer damage. In some crops they’ve even used the gene that creates the poison in scorpions to create built-in insecticide.’

  Li nodded. ‘It is a great delicacy in China.’

  She looked at him, puzzled. ‘What is?’

  ‘Scorpion. Deep fried. Eaten for medicinal purposes.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No,’ he said very seriously. ‘It is true. But I wouldn’t recommend them. They taste like shit.’

  ‘Yeah, and I can just imagine how the toxin genes might make my porridge taste.’ Her smile faded. ‘The thing is, all this is just the tip of the iceberg, Li Yan. Scientists are releasing modified bacteria and viruses into the environment in vast quantities through the introduction of genetically engineered crops. And they haven’t a clue what the long-term effects will be. Jesus, in ten years, it’s doubtful if there will be a single food left on the planet that hasn’t been genetically tampered with, and there’s not a damned thing any of us can do about it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And do you know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  She paused for effect. ‘Money. That’s what motivates the whole science. Research into biotechnology will be worth around one hundred billion dollars by the turn of the millennium. They tell us it’s for “the good of mankind”, to feed the hungry millions of the world. But there is not a shred of evidence that the technology will be any cheaper, or any more productive in the long term.

  ‘When they ran into trouble with regulators in the States, the big biochemical companies simply started moving their projects to other parts of the world. Like China. Places where there is little or no regulation to govern the commercial introduction of genetically modified crops. And do you know what’s interesting? When one of these companies comes up with a crop that’s resistant to a certain herbicide, guess who also manufactures that herbicide.’

  ‘The same company?’

  ‘You’re catching on. And instead of reducing the amount of herbicide we’re polluting our planet with, we’ll be using even more, because the crop we’re growing is resistant to it.’

  She slapped her palms on her thighs. ‘Jesus, it makes me so mad! And these goddamn scientists! Philanthropists? Like hell. They’ll do anything to keep the funding coming in from the biochemical companies so they can carry on playing God. And don’t believe the myth about these crops bringing down costs and increasing yield to feed the third world. Remember the guy with the tomatoes – the fact that he has to buy fresh seeds every year? Well, that’s what farmers in the third world are going to have to do, too. And who will they have to buy them from? Well, the biochemical companies, of course – who also control the price.’

  Li shook his head. ‘This is all a bit too much for me. I mean, all I know is that they brought in this super-rice three years ago and they have doubled production. There is no hunger in China. For the first time we are major exporters of food to other countries.’

  Margaret shrugged, passion finally spent. And she wondered what point there had ever been in it. There was nothing she could do to change the way things were. ‘I guess,’ she sighed. ‘Like I said, it’s not as if the technology might not have some benefits. It’s the long term I worry about. The consequences we can’t possibly predict that are going to affect our children, or our children’s children.’

  Li growled and banged the steering wheel. The traffic had ground to yet another halt. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

  ‘Nearly half past.’

  He shook his head. ‘We’ll be here all day at this rate.’ He opened his window and placed the red light on the roof, flicked it on and activated his siren. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and started nudging his way out of the gridlock and into the cycle lane, where they picked up speed, bicycles parting in panic ahead of them. He flicked her a glance. ‘Now that the window is down anyway, maybe you wouldn’t mind if I had a cigarette? After everything you have told me it can’t be as bad for me as eating.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the genes they’ve been putting in tobacco plants.’

  II

  The great paved concourse in front of Beijing railway station was jammed with rush-hour commuters. Modern twin clock towers separated by a gigantic digital display rose above broad steps leading to the main entrance, where baggage was being run through X-ray machines under the watchful eye of armed policemen. Li nosed the Jeep over the sidewalk and on to the concourse, exchanging horn blasts with buses and taxis. By now he had cut the siren and brought the flashing red light back inside. So he was just another anonymous citizen in a Beijing Jeep. A couple of girls sweeping up litter with old-fashioned straw brooms, and clever shovels with mouths that opened and closed like hungry dogs, shouted imprecations at the Jeep for forcing them to move out of the way. They could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen, dressed in baggy blue overalls and white tee-shirts. They had large pale blue bandanas wrapped around their faces to protect them from dust billowing up from the concrete as they swept. Red motorised baggage trolleys weaved their way among the crowds. Groups of travellers sat patiently on the steps in the shade of black umbrellas, luggage piled high all around them. Margaret followed Li into the ticket hall in the station’s west wing.

  Long queues snaked back across marble tiles from a row of hatches that ran the length of the back wall. Destinations were marked above each window in Chinese characters, and Margaret wondered how the casual foreign traveller would know which one to go to. A woman’s strangely disconnected nasal voice droned monotonously over the Tannoy, announcing departures and arrivals. Li joined the back of one of the queues and stood tapping his foot impatiently.

  ‘Where is your uncle going?’ she asked, more for something to say than out of any real interest.

  ‘Sichuan,’ he said distractedly.

  ‘That’s where your family comes from, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s going to see my father in Wanxian, and then on to Zigong to talk to my sister.’

  There was something in the stress he put on the word ‘talk’ that aroused her curiosity. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘She is pregnant.’

  ‘That’s a problem?’

  ‘You ask too many questions.’

  ‘I’m a nosy bitch.’ She waited.

  He sighed. ‘She already has a child.’ He took in Margaret’s frown of puzzlement. ‘You have never heard of China’s One-child Policy?’

  ‘Ah.’ Understanding dawned. Of course she had heard. And she had always wondered how it was possible to enforce such a policy. ‘What can they do to you if you do have a second child?’

  ‘When you get married,’ he said,
‘you are asked to make a public commitment to having only one child. You sign what they call a “letter of determination”. In return you receive financial and other privileges – priority in education and medicine for your child, an increase in income, better housing. There is also strong pressure to be sterilised. But if you then go on to have more than one child, you will lose all your benefits, maybe even your house.’ He shook his head slowly, clearly concerned. ‘And during the second pregnancy there will be other pressures, psychological, sometimes physical, to have an abortion. The consequences can be terrible, either way.’

  Margaret tried to imagine the US government trying to tell Americans how many children they could have. She couldn’t. But at the same time she knew what unchecked population growth would do to a country that already comprised a quarter of the world’s population. Starvation, economic ruin. It was a dreadful dichotomy. ‘Is she going to have the baby?’ He nodded. ‘But did she and her husband sign this “letter of declaration”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why is she so determined to have another child?’

  ‘Because their first child was a girl.’

  Margaret pulled a face. ‘So? What’s wrong with girls? Some would say they’re a lot better than boys.’ She grinned. ‘And, in my humble opinion, there’d be a lot of merit in that view.’

  ‘Not in China.’

  And she saw that he was serious. ‘You’re kidding. Why not?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not easy to explain,’ he said, waving an arm in a gesture of futility. ‘It has to do with Confucianism, and the ancient Chinese belief in ancestor worship. But perhaps more than all of that, there is one very practical reason. Traditionally, when a son marries he brings his new wife to live with his parents, and as the parents grow aged the younger couple look after them. If all you have is a daughter, she will go to live with her husband’s parents, and there will be no one to look after you in your old age.’

  ‘But if everyone only has one child, and every child is a son, there won’t be any women to bear the next generation of children.’