I am actually dying having to wait so long to read the next chapter. Hey, let's hope the world doesn't end before I do! This chapter was more exposition from McCain, explaining exactly what he was going to do. I know loads of people have said this, but is there a kind of 'bad guy syndrome' which makes all the bad guys explain what they're doing to the one person who could likely destroy them? Because seriously, all of them do it. I know it's necessary to move the plot on, but I'm ignoring that because that's boring. I know Alex is going to survive, that McCain won't kill him, because I know there's another book. Obviously it's a mistake telling him all this when there's the slightest chance he might escape and undo all McCain's work. Oh well, it's good for Alex.
McCain says that he decided to set up a charity because it was an easy way for him to make money. I'm not sure how on earth he gets away with it but somehow whenever people give to charity after some natural disaster he takes a huge load of that money for himself. How twisted is that? Using other people's desperate situations for your own advantage. I may have problems with McCain in relation to other 'baddies', but I definitely think he's evil.
But not only is he prepared to scrounge money those who need it, McCain has started creating his own disasters. He mentions the Nuclear Plant from chapter one, and now we know that Ravi was blowing the station up just to make a greedy man more money. And now he's setting up something else: a plague that will sweep over Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, affecting millions. Now, because he knows that these disasters are going to happen, he can send people from his charity there almost instantaneously without any questions asked, therefore being the first charity to appeal for help and the charity to get the most money. Good grief, he is not a nice guy.
All the things that didn't make sense earlier are now fitting together. The scene that Alex stumbled across earlier in that film studio is for an appeal video which McCain will release way before the other charities have even got to Kenya, and no one will know the difference.
And then, as I worked out last chapter, McCain tells Alex that by pulling the lever in the aeroplane he started of the plague. Remember Leonard Straik from Greenfields? He invented this gene thing which alters a single gene of a plant, making it potentially lethal. What Alex sprayed on the field was some kind of mushroom thing which, once out in the sun for a while, changes one of its genes and becomes lethal. The wind will blow its spores over to the next field, and the next, and the next etc, gradually touching nearly every field in these three countries.
Oh, and by the way, McCain casually drops into the convo that he killed Straik. By shoving a poisonous snail down his throat. Well that's nice.
So McCain is basically evil, and reminds Alex that, rather than ask him nicely what Alex knows and what MI6 know, he's going to torture it out of him. Tomorrow. And I really can't see how Alex is going to get out of this one.
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