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
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
