Crocodile Tears

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