Mm'selle Gamboul. I'll take our prisoner. Mm'selle Gamboul will want to question him herself.'
They made it just as the sky again darkened to the blackness of night. As he alighted he could hear the scream of a second tornado approaching from the far side of the city. He ran for the shelter of the house, leaving Yusel in the car.
Gamboul was seated at her desk as usual. Her face was a blur in the gloom. The electricity had failed, and the heavy curtains had been torn away from the windows where the little intricately shaped panes had been blown out.
She looked up as Kaufman came close to the desk. 'Ah, there you are,' she said impatiently. 'I want you to get out to the compound as soon as the storm eases and phone Vienna.
Tell them that we're in charge now and they must take orders from us.'
He showed no surprise. 'I shall not phone Vienna,' he said slowly and deliberately. 'There are some things you can't make a deal in, and this is one of them. I have been out in it. And I've important news.'
She stood up and approached the window, moving to the side in case more glass was blown out. 'You're afraid, you too, are you?' she sneered. 'Everyone is afraid of responsibility, of taking risks. This afternoon I visited the girl. She is dying, that one. And raving as she dies. She told me that the computer was wrong, that the message did not tell me this.
But I know, Herr Kaufman, I know! The power and the knowledge are all in my hands. No one else's.'
Kaufman crossed the room and stood beside her. Somewhere in the town a fire had started. Despite the rain, the wind was whipping it into a small holocaust.
'Reports of everything you have done for the past month have been smuggled out of the country,' he said. 'There is a man who has been here for some time. He is waiting to take a specimen of the bacteria to London.'
She wheeled on him. 'You will stop him, of course,' she warned.
He shook his head. 'I shall not.' His voice was almost gentle as he went on, 'You are not sane. You would lead us all into destruction.'
'You poor little man.' She showed no anger, only contempt.
'You are like all the rest. You have not the imagination to see. Come here!'
Abruptly she walked to the glass door leading to the balcony and turned the handle. She had to lean against it with all her weight to force it open against the wind.
'Come!' she repeated. 'Come and see the elements at work.
Working for me!' He stayed stubbornly where he was.
'You are frightened?' she laughed. 'There is no need. It will not touch us. It cannot.'
She walked majestically on to the balcony, her hair blowing back from her forehead, and paused at the balustrade, stretching her arms towards the sky. Kaufman caught the sound of her ecstatic laughter in the howling wind.
On an impulse he crossed to the door and pulled it shut.
The bedlam outside lessened as if it had moved away. Suddenly there was a crescendo of noise and the great old house shook. A piece of coping crashed on the balcony, smashing into a score of pieces.
He saw Gamboul stare down at a lump of jagged marble just as a cascade of sand struck her. She bent quickly, rubbing her fists in her eyes. Blindly she stumbled to the door and began beating on it. The thick, decorative glass broke. Her fist ran with blood. He could see her mouth opening and shutting as she screamed at him.
He backed into the gloom of the room, watching impassively.
The bursts of wind were coming faster now, until one merged into another. The house groaned and trembled.
At last it came: a roaring, crumbling mass of stone which crashed on to the balcony and, tearing it out by its concrete roots, hurled it down into the courtyard below. The dust of debris mixed with the sand like eddying smoke. Kaufman walked forward, pressing his face myopically against the glass to see what had happened.
It was all very indistinct, but he thought he could see a twisted body among the rubble below. He kept on looking for a minute or so. He felt none of the disquiet that the sight of the old Arab woman had given him. Eventually he sought a chair well away from the crumbling walls. With a completely steady hand he lighted a cigarello.
'When the storm is past,' he said aloud to the empty room, 'I shall make myself a call to London. There is the matter of relations with the English.'
He frowned, hoping that this would not be too great a problem. Professor Dawnay might be amenable; but Fleming was a formidable adversary. There had, after all, been so many unfortunate incidents between them in the past. The English mentality when it got obstinate ideas was something he had never understood.
The storm weakened, the clouds thinned and light returned though the wind blew nearly as hard as before. He went down to the courtyard. Yusel had been taken into the cellars, a guard reported. Kaufman heard himself giving orders for him to be kept under guard but decently treated, and then went and looked at Gamboul's body. It lay, twisted and broken, among the fallen stonework, and her dark eyes, rimmed with blood, stared lifelessly up at him.
One of her cars was undamaged, and Kaufman ordered the driver to take him to the computer compound. Damage on the route through the town's outskirts was appalling. A scattering of Arabs were looting destroyed shops; they fled at the sight of the car with the Intel insignia. There were no troops or police anywhere.
The squat, solid buildings inside the compound seemed reasonably intact; a few windows were blown in, and some of the garish, modernistic fripperies at the entrance to the executive building had toppled. Kaufman drove past them, straight to the laboratories.
Dawnay was alone, injecting bacteria into rows of test tubes. The disorderly array of apparatus occupying every bench and table she had been able to commandeer was strangely reassuring after the desolation outside.
'Ah, Professor Dawnay,' Kaufman beamed, 'you were not damaged by the storm, I trust?'
'No,' she said shortly.
'I have to inform you,' he went on, 'that Fraulein Gamboul is dead.' He enjoyed her look of amazement. 'She was killed by the tornado. I am now the senior representative of Intel in this country. I ask you to help me. Our measures against the bacteria causing the storms: they are successful, yes?'
'It looks like it, now, and in the sea here,' she replied.
'Wunderbar.' he said. 'Everywhere else things go from bad to worse - unless we give them your cure.'
'And quickly.'
Kaufman nodded. 'That is what I have thought.' He dropped his voice. 'You know, Professor, Fraulein Gamboul was prepared to let it go on until the world accepted her terms, outrageous terms. She was insane, of course. Did you know that she killed Salim, shot him dead herself? She was a woman possessed. She would have left everything too late.
We should all have perished.'
Dawnay looked at him coldly. 'We may still.'
He licked his lips nervously and removed his glasses, polishing the lenses over and over again. 'There has been an appeal from London over the radio. I shall answer it when communications are restored. And I shall prove we can help by sending your own personal report on the anti-bacterium.
Professor Neilson shall take it on the first available plane.'
He saw her startled look.
'Oh yes,' he said triumphantly, replacing his glasses and staring at her. 'I know all about Professor Neilson being here.
He will not wish to trust me. He does not yet understand that I am just a business man, and a good business man sees through calamity to brighter things.'
Dawnay could not disguise her relief. 'So Neilson will explain how you can give bulk supplies to the world?'
He shook his head impatiently. 'Not at once,' he said.
'People will be prepared to pay a great deal. I told you I am a business man.' He turned to the door. His smile had gone.
'You will have a typed report ready for despatch in an hour.'
For a while Dawnay went on with her work like an automaton. She had not counted on Kaufman haggling
