Crocodile Tears (28 page)

“My foster father managed to get me a job with a real estate developer, and that was how I found myself in the lucrative world of property. It was an area in which I had almost immediate success. At that time, it was easy to make a fast profit and I began to do well. People noticed me. You could not be a successful black person in Britain without standing out, and as I moved up the ladder, more and more businessmen wanted to be seen with me, to pretend that they were my friends. People liked inviting me to dinner parties. They thought of me as a bit of a character—particularly after my brief fame in the boxing ring.

“I made a large donation to the Conservative party, and as a result I was asked if I would like to become a prospective member of Parliament. I accepted and I was duly voted in, even though the seat had been Labour for as long as anyone could remember. Success followed success, Alex. I became a junior minister in the department of sport. I would often find myself on the terrace outside the House of Commons, sipping champagne with the prime minister. The entire cabinet came to my Christmas parties, which became famous for their fine vintage wine and chicken pies. I gave talks all over the country. And, thanks to my property empire, I was getting richer than ever. I still remember buying my first Rolls-Royce. At the time, I couldn’t even drive—but what did I care? The next day I went out and hired a chauffeur. By the time I was thirty, I had a dozen people working for me.”

He spread his hands. “And then it all went wrong again.”

“You were sent to prison for fraud.” Alex remembered what Sabina’s father had said.

“Yes. Isn’t it amazing how quickly people desert you? Without a moment’s hesitation, my so-called friends turned their backs on me. I was thrown out of Parliament. All my wealth was taken from me. Journalists in the main newspapers jeered and mocked me in a way that was every bit as bad as the boys I had once known at school. In prison, I was beaten up so often that the hospital reserved a bed for me. Other men would have chosen to end it all, Alex—and there were times when even I considered dashing my head against a concrete wall. But I didn’t—because already I was planning my comeback. I knew that I could use my disgrace as just one more step on the journey I had been born to make.”

“You didn’t convert to Christianity,” Alex said. “You just pretended.”

McCain laughed. “Of course! I read the Bible. I spent hours talking to the prison chaplain, a pompous fool who couldn’t see farther than the end of his own dog collar. I took a course on the Internet and got myself ordained. The Reverend Desmond McCain! It was all lies . . . but it was necessary. Because I had worked out what I was going to do next. I was going to be rich again. Fifty times richer than I had ever been before.”

Alex had left most of his food. One of the guards came over and took the plates away, removing McCain’s unfinished food. Another brought over a basket of fruit. In the brief silence, Alex listened to the sounds of the night: the soft murmur of the river as it flowed past, the endless whisper of the undergrowth, the occasional cry of some animal far away. He was sitting in the open air, in Africa! And yet he couldn’t enjoy his surroundings. He was sitting at a table with a madman. He knew it all too well. McCain might have suffered hardships in his life, but what had happened to him had nothing to do with his background or his color; they were convenient excuses now. He had been a psychopath from the start.

“Charity,” McCain said. “A very wise man once defined charity in the following way. He said it was poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries.” He smiled at the thought. “Well, I have been thinking a lot about charity, Alex—and in particular how to use it for my own ends.” For a moment he looked up at the night sky, his eyes fixed on the full moon. “And in less than twenty-four hours, my moment will come. The seeds have already been sown . . . and I mean that quite literally.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Alex interrupted. “You’re faking some sort of disaster. You’re going to steal the money for yourself.”

“Oh—no, no, no,” McCain replied. He lowered his head and gazed at Alex. “The disaster is going to be quite real. It’s going to happen here in Kenya and very soon. Thousands of people are going to die, I’m afraid. Men, women, and children. And let me tell you something rather disturbing. I really want you to know this.

“I can see the way you’re looking at me, Alex. The contempt in your eyes. I’m used to it. I’ve had it all my life. But when the dying begins—and it will be very soon—just remember. It wasn’t me who started it.”

He paused. And somehow Alex knew what he was going to say next.

“It was you.”

19

ALL FOR CHARITY

THE GUARDS HAD SERVED COFFEE and McCain had lit a cigarette. Watching the gray smoke trickle out of the corner of his mouth, Alex was reminded of a gangster in an old black-and-white film. As far as he was concerned, the habit couldn’t kill McCain quickly enough.

McCain stirred his coffee with a second silver straw. The night had become very still, as if even the animals out in the bush had decided to listen in. The breeze had dropped and the air was heavy and warm.

“There are two ways to become rich,” McCain began again. “You can persuade one person to give you a lot of money—but that means finding someone who is wealthy and stupid enough in the first place, and it may involve criminal violence. Or you can ask a great many people to give you a little money. This was the thought that obsessed me while I was in prison, and it was there that I came up with my idea. It was easy enough to fake my conversion to Christianity. Everyone likes a sinner who repents. And it certainly impressed the parole board. I was released a long time before I had completed my sentence and I immediately set up my charity, First Aid. The aim, as I described it, was to be the first organization to respond to disasters wherever they took place.

“I would imagine that you know very little about international charity, Alex. But when a catastrophe occurs—the Asian tsunami in 2004 is a good example—people all over the world rush to respond. Old-age pensioners dip into their savings. Ten dollars here, twenty dollars there. It soon adds up. At the same time, banks and businesses fight to outdo each other with very public displays of generosity. None of them really care about people dying in undeveloped countries. Some donate because they feel guilty about their own wealth. Others, as I say, do it for the publicity—”

“I don’t agree with you,” Alex cut in. He was thinking of Brookland School and the money they had collected for Comic Relief. There had been a whole week of activities and everyone had been proud of what they had achieved. “You see the world this way because you’re greedy and mad. People give to charity because they want to help.”

“Your opinions mean nothing to me,” McCain snapped, and Alex was pleased to see that he was annoyed. The anger was pricking at his eyes. “And if you interrupt again, I’ll have you tied down and beaten.” He leaned forward and sucked at his coffee. “The motives are irrelevant anyway. What counts is the money. Six hundred million dollars was raised for the tsunami in the United Kingdom alone. It’s very difficult to say what a charity like Oxfam raises over a period of twelve months, but I can tell you that last year they raised the same figure—six hundred million in Great Britain. That was just one office. Oxfam also has branches in a dozen other countries and subbranches in places like India and Mexico. You do the math!”

McCain fell silent. For a moment, his eyes were far away.

“Millions and millions of dollars and pounds and Euros,” he murmured. “And because the cash comes so quickly and in such large amounts, it is almost impossible to follow. An ordinary business has accountants. But a charity operates in many countries, often in appalling conditions—which makes it much less easy to pin down.”

“So basically you’re just a common thief,” Alex said. He knew he was treading close to the line, but he couldn’t resist needling McCain. “You’re planning to steal a lot of money.”

McCain nodded. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to be offended. “I am a thief. But not a common one at all. I am the greatest thief who ever lived. And I do not need to take the money. People give it to me willingly.”

“You said you were going to create a disaster.”

“I’m glad you were listening. That is exactly what I am going to do . . . or perhaps I should say it is exactly what I have done. What
we
have done. The disaster is already happening, even as we sit here in this pleasant night air.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.

“People need a reason to give money, and my genius, if you will forgive the word, has simply been to work out that the reason can be created, artificially. I can give you an example. A serious accident took place last year at the Jowada nuclear power station in Chennai, southern India. You may remember reading about it in the newspapers. That was a fairly simple matter, a bomb carried into the plant by one of my operatives. I have to say that the results were disappointing. The full force of the blast and the resulting radioactivity were contained and did less damage than I had hoped. But even so, First Aid was the first on the scene and received more than two million dollars in donations. Some of it, of course, we had to give away. We had to buy large quantities of some sort of antiradiation drug, and we had to pay for advertising. Even so, we made a tax-free profit of about eight hundred thousand dollars. It was a useful dress rehearsal for the event I was planning here, in Kenya. It also helped us with our operating costs.”

“And what are you planning here? What do you mean when you say I started it?”

“We’ll come back to you in a minute, Alex. But what I am planning here is a good old-fashioned plague. Not just in Kenya, but in Uganda and Tanzania too. I am talking about a disaster on a scale never seen before. And the beauty of it is that I am completely in control. But I don’t need to describe it to you. I can show you. I am, as you will see, one step ahead of the game.”

McCain opened his laptop computer and spun it around so that Alex could see the screen. “When the disaster begins, a few weeks from now, other charities will rush to the scene. In a sense, all charities are waiting for bad things to happen. It is the reason for their existence. We need to be faster than them. The first on the ground will scoop the lion’s share of the money. So we have already prepared our appeal . . .”

He pressed the Enter button.

A film began to play on the computer. Slowly, the camera zoomed in on an African village. At first, everything seemed normal. But then Alex heard the buzz of flies and saw the first dead bodies. A couple of cows lay on their sides with bloated stomachs and rigid, distended legs. The camera passed an eagle which seemed to have crash-landed, slamming into the dust. And at the same time, he heard a voice speaking in a soft, urgent tone.

“Something terrible is happening in Kenya,” the commentary began. “A dreadful plague has hit the land and nobody knows how it began. But people are dying. In the thousands. The oldest and the youngest have been the first to go . . .”

Now the camera had reached the first child, staring up with empty eyes.

“Animals are not immune. African wildlife is being decimated. This beautiful country is in the grip of a nightmare and we urgently need money, now, to save it before it’s too late. First Aid is running emergency food supplies. First Aid is already on the ground with vital medicine and fresh water. First Aid is funding urgent scientific research to find the cause of this disaster and to bring it to an end. But we cannot do it without you. Please send as much as you can today.

“Call us or visit our website. Our lines are open twenty-four hours a day. Save Kenya. Save the people. How can we ignore their cry for help?”

The final image showed a giraffe stretched out in the grass with part of its rib cage jutting 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.