Peter May - The Firemaker

He turned away, wandering off across the flagstones, talking at the night. ‘Jesus, it was so beautiful. A grain of rice impervious to insects or disease or fungus. Indestructible. Guaranteed one hundred per cent return from planting.’

‘How did you do it?’ Margaret asked.

He spun round, eyes gleaming. ‘How did I do it? It was easy. It was so simple it was perfection. I took a cholera toxin gene — you know, the stuff that makes cholera fucking lethal — and I put it in the rice.’

Margaret looked at him, horrified. ‘But that’s… insane.’

McCord shook his head, almost laughing at her shock. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘The cholera toxin killed everything. Insects, bacteria, viruses, fungi.’

‘And people?’

‘Well, that was the beauty of it. You cooked it, it was harmless, and the rice tasted every bit as good as it always had. But the really clever bit was getting it in there. Smart stuff, state of the art. But I told you all this.’ He waved his little finger at her. ‘Remember?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said dryly. ‘Your little penis.’

He grinned. ‘So I took my cholera toxin gene, stuck it on the back of a friendly virus, and sent it in to multiply in the DNA of the rice.’

‘A friendly virus?’ Margaret asked, unable to keep the scepticism from her voice.

He clouded. ‘Sure. In this case the cauliflower mosaic virus. Makes all those patterns on the leaves of a cauliflower. We’ve been eating it for thousands of years and it’s never done us any harm.’

‘So you thought it would be a good idea to feed people cholera toxin genes and cauliflower viruses when they thought they were eating rice?’

‘It worked. And it was perfectly harmless.’ McCord was almost aggressive in his defensiveness. ‘We had extensive field trials in the south. The research team lived on the stuff for a year before we ever went public with it. The returns were terrific and it tasted great.’ It was his turn to be sarcastic. ‘And no one died of cholera toxin or mosaic virus.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘So we launched it three years ago. All over China. The results were phenomenal, Dr Campbell. Phenomenal. Yields increased by up to a hundred per cent. Goodbye hunger.’

‘And hello profit.’

‘And why the hell not!’ McCord turned on her. ‘You put up the money, you take the risk, you reap the rewards.’

‘Why do I get the feeling there’s a “but” somewhere in our future?’ Margaret asked.

He gave her a sour look and took a couple of long pulls on his cigarette before he spoke again. ‘They never told me about Chao getting ill. Nearly a year ago. At first they thought it was AIDS. He liked boys, you know.’ He wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘They were treating him for AIDS, but it wasn’t that, and they started getting worried, and Pang had him admitted to Military Hospital Number 301.’ He stood staring at the ground, breathing stertorously, as if he had been running. ‘It was some new fucking virus no one had seen before. A retrovirus. Lies dormant in the brain for five years or more. You don’t even know it’s there. Then for no reason it decides it’s going to screw you. Starts attacking the white blood cells and ends up completely fucking your immune system. Bit like AIDS, only worse. And harder to pin down, ’cos it mutates faster than you can say “Gotcha”.’ He dragged his eyes up to meet hers and held them for a long moment before the truth suddenly dawned on her.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘It’s in the rice.’ And the hair rose upon the back of her neck and along her arms and on her thighs.

His eyes filled up again and he flicked his cigarette vindictively at the night. ‘Somehow,’ he said, ‘somewhere along the line, our innocent little cauliflower mosaic virus recombined with another virus, probably something equally innocuous somewhere out there in the test environment.’ He paused to catch his breath, coming now in increasingly short bursts. ‘And we got a mutation. A third and, this time, lethal virus. RiceX Virus they’re calling it. RXV. Inherent in the genetic make-up of the rice. We never even knew it was there.’

There was a long silence as Margaret absorbed what he had just told her. She was aware of the blood pulsing behind her eyes, in her throat, in the pit of her stomach. She felt sick. ‘You mean it’s still there in the rice?’ she asked eventually. He nodded. ‘The stuff that people are growing and eating?’ He nodded again. ‘And anyone who eats it has got, or is going to get, this virus… this RXV?’

He dragged his eyes away from his feet for a moment to stare off into the trees. His voice was trembling. ‘Of course, it won’t show itself for another couple of years yet. Chao was eating it long before it went into production.’

Margaret simply found herself unable to deal with the scale of what he was saying. ‘But that’s more than a billion people,’ she gasped.

He shrugged. ‘More than that. They’ve been exporting super-rice all over the world. And once the virus is out there, who knows how else it’s transmitted? We could be looking at half the world’s population or more.’

And in that moment, Margaret was struck by the sickening realisation that she, too, had eaten the rice. For a moment she simply couldn’t believe it. There had to be a mistake, some way of undoing it. She couldn’t be going to die just because she’d eaten some rice. It was like the moment she had heard that Michael was dead. She couldn’t accept it. It just didn’t seem possible. She wheeled round on McCord, fear turning to anger turning to rage.

‘You fucking people!’ she screamed at him, her voice echoing back from every marble surface and rising into the hot pine-scented night. ‘You stupid fucking people! What nature took three billion years to achieve, you thought you could do in three. You thought you could play fucking God!’

McCord flinched, but he did not speak for a long time. ‘Irony is,’ he said finally, ‘I haven’t eaten rice since I was a kid. Got an allergic reaction to the stuff.’

Margaret was riven between despair and anger. She wanted to fly at him, punching and kicking and tearing at his face. But her despair robbed her of strength and she stood helplessly in the night, crushed and burdened by the weight of what she knew — that she had eaten death and there was no way back; that before she died she would see two billion people, maybe more, die ahead of her; that there was nothing she could do about any of it.

Hot, salty tears filled her eyes, blurring and distorting the image of McCord in front her. ‘Why are they even bothering to try and cover it up?’ she asked hopelessly. ‘What’s the point?’

‘Because they’re scared and they’re stupid,’ he said. ‘Grogan figured if they could keep it under wraps, they’d have two years to unearth a cure before they got found out.’

‘They’re mad!’

‘That’s what I told them. Jesus Christ, the world’s been searching for a cure for AIDS for nearly two decades, and they think they’re going to find a cure for RXV in two years?’ He snorted his derision. ‘But Pang Xiaosheng went along with it, basically ’cos he’d got no fucking choice. Soon as the Chinese government finds out what he’s done he’s a dead man. And Chao… well, Chao was dying already, and he was going to tell the world. So Grogan brought in this pro from Hong Kong. Some Triad hit-man who was going to be invisible in China, they thought. He took care of Chao and reckoned he’d destroyed the evidence by setting him on fire. And then you came along and started cutting him up and asking for blood tests. It was all getting out of hand…’

Through all her emotions — of self-pity, of horror and shock — her brain was sending tiny alarm signals to her conscious mind. She forced herself to stop and think and focus. She stared at him, and he became discomfited. ‘What are you fucking staring at?’ he demanded accusingly.