Crocodile Tears

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 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