The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1) by Peter May

Author:Peter May [May, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2012-06-27T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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