Devil’s Harvest by Andrew Brown Page B

voice was nasal, as if compensating for the presence of the foreign object. For a moment, Gabriel wondered if she was a foreigner. Her question was delivered with intensity, a plea for him to engage with her seriously. It was intolerable, this neediness, this inability to articulate a single clear sentence. He felt trapped and quickly brought the conversation to an end, escaping her intellectual whimpering with an impolite excuse.
    Outside, his breath soon frosted in the air from the exertion. As he turned the corner, he spotted an ash-stained rubbish bucket and uncurled his fingers to toss the herbalist’s card away. He glanced at the bent piece of cardboard as he thrust his opening palm towards the wastebin.
    Professor Abdurahman Ismail,
    Department of Botany,
    Faculty of Science and Technology,
    University of Khartoum, Sudan.
    Oh God, Gabriel groaned.
    * * *
    Gabriel flopped down into Brian Hargreaves’s leather armchair. The fabric had been worn to a sheen on the arms, and the beading along the sides sprouted threads that gave it a herbaceous appearance. Hargreaves contemplated his friend and colleague while resting his double chin portentously on his fist, one eyebrow raised.
    ‘The intellect is dead, long live the intellect,’ Gabriel said, his words accentuated by the hiss of air escaping from the cushion as his weight dropped into the seat.
    ‘Surely not that bad?’ Hargreaves gave a nervous smile, his round lips lifting and pulling facial fat across his cheeks. ‘Sorry I didn’t make the lecture, I came in a bit late today.’
    Gabriel felt his usual annoyance rise. Hargreaves had allowed a sharp mind to wallow in a morass of social mediocrity and physical excess. When they’d first met, the man had been half the size, a portly but focused young scientist working on gene-sequencing in spirulina mutations. The work had been groundbreaking, and Gabriel had entered into energetic conversations with him around his research. Their friendship was cemented around nucleotide disparity rather than anything more personal. It had remained that way ever since.
    ‘As bad as that. Good grief, Brian, there’s a parasitic dearth of intelligence out there, bloated from rational inactivity.’ Gabriel found his references inevitably drifting towards metaphors of obesity in his friend’s company, the uncomfortable issue of his weight unspoken save for these parried blows. He moved on to safer territory. ‘What news from your source at Zhejiang? What the hell are the Chinese up to?’
    Hargreaves sucked at his lower lip like a lozenge, letting the flesh pop back from the bar of his teeth. ‘Apparently they’ve hit a glitch. Something to do with the SXRF microprobe. Some kind of setback, that’s all I’m told.’
    ‘And you believe your mysterious mole?’ Gabriel felt warm with excitement.
    ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ Hargreaves had a rather pained expression, suggestive of a digestive impasse more than anything else. ‘It’s got the smell of Copenhagen all over again. A diversion. To set us off course.’
    Gabriel knew what his colleague was thinking, even before he saw Hargreaves avert his eyes. ‘Brian, you know as well as I do that collaboration with the Chinese on this involves me bending over to give them a pedestal to stand on, waving their flags, and a bum to wipe their shoes on.’
    Hargreaves’s lack of ambition would have them sidling up to the competition, only to be left on the back benches of scientific progress. Gabriel closed his eyes in an effort to centre himself. They sat for a while in silence, each contemplating the unspoken recriminations that academics harboured in their hearts.
    ‘Well, old chap,’ Hargreaves broke the silence, ‘assuming it’s not a Copenhagen switch, the information is that they’re being delayed by the X-ray fluorescence probe. That would mean they could surely only be ready for submission by the end of the year, at the soonest. That leaves the field wide