McCord seemed spent, and very small and insignificant in the shadow of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. “It was Chao Heng who set up the super-rice research programme for the Ministry of Agriculture. He was Pang’s man. And it was Chao who brought me in. That meant doing a deal with my employers, Grogan Industries. They were happy to put up the money, because Pang was in a hurry and they’d have a free hand. None of the interference they’d have got from government bodies in the States. The chance to put all their theories into practice on a grand scale. If it came off, they got the patent on the super-rice and the chance to sell it worldwide. Worth billions. Billions and billions. The Chinese? Well, they’d just be happy because they could feed themselves, and Pang could sell himself as the man to lead them into the next millennium. And me? I was the man who was going to create the super-rice. And I did.”

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?”