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 leave 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 fiancee 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.”
