The Firemaker (29 page)

‘Of course.’ She paused. ‘You were very rude to me in the bar last night.’ He looked at her blankly. ‘You probably don’t even remember.’

‘So what
are
you doing here?’ he persisted.

‘Oh, nothing much. Lending my expertise to the fight against Chinese crime would probably be a good way of putting it.’ He frowned. ‘I did an autopsy on a murder victim who used to work here.’

McCord stopped in his tracks. ‘
You
did the autopsy on Chao Heng?’

‘Yes. Why? Did you know him?’

McCord brought out a grubby white handkerchief and mopped his face, avoiding her eye. ‘Worked with him for five years. A real weirdo.’ Then he looked at her very strangely, she thought. ‘I heard he committed suicide.’

But her mind was riffling back through the things Li had told her earlier about Chao Heng, making a connection that hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘Wait a minute. After his postgrad year at Wisconsin, he spent seven years at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. Isn’t that the place you got kicked out of?’

‘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.’

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.’