Peter May - The Firemaker

‘I didn’t get “kicked out” of anywhere.’

‘So you knew him back then?’

‘So what? It’s not a crime.’ He dabbed furiously at his face with his handkerchief. ‘You’re not suggesting I had anything to do with his murder, are you?’

‘Of course not. I doubt if you could hold a match steady long enough to strike it.’

His mouth relapsed into its earlier sneer. ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’

‘Hey,’ Margaret said, ‘you already asked me that. And you know what? I can’t think of a single reason why I should.’

He glared at her for a moment, thoughts flitting through his mind like clouds on a windy day. But he thought better of giving voice to any of them. And suddenly he had that frightened-rabbit look again, and he turned without a word and hurried off towards the main building. He passed Li in the doorway but didn’t acknowledge him. Li walked across the compound to where Margaret stood waiting.

‘Renewing old friendships?’ he asked.

‘You know, that man seriously pisses me off,’ Margaret said.

‘He didn’t look too happy about seeing you either.’ They walked towards the Jeep. ‘You know he and Chao Heng worked on the super-rice project together?’

‘He just told me. Well, not in so many words. But I guessed that’s what it was.’ She glanced at him. ‘You learn anything new in there?’

Li sighed. ‘Not a lot more than we already knew. Just that Chao was responsible for setting up the research project that led to the development of the super-rice. Apparently he was the one who suggested bringing McCord in. It seems they knew one another in the States.’

‘Yes, they were both at the Boyce Thompson Institute. I just put that one together.’

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.’

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.’