Termination Shock

Nederland

The last two hours of the flight to Schiphol featured some of the worst turbulence Saskia had ever experienced. She very much wished she was in the business jet’s cockpit, where she would have enjoyed a better view of the horizon and some sense of being in control. The great circle route from Texas scissored across a storm that was pouring down the gap between Norway and Britain and scheduled to hit the Netherlands coast early in the morning local time. Finally they ranged out ahead of it, though, and made the final descent and landing in calm air. She was glad she’d taken the advice to advance the timing of their departure from the airstrip at Flying S.

Queen Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia passed through immigration formalities like anybody else inside the main terminal at Schiphol. This reminded her that they had never formally entered the United States. Had Willem somehow smoothed that over? Or was it still a dangling loose end? If so, did it really matter now that they were back on Dutch soil? These questions caused her to review in her mind all that had happened in the last week, beginning with the pigs on the runway and culminating with totally satisfactory casual sex with Rufus last night on an antique railway carriage in a high desert valley in the wilds of West Texas. Walking through Schiphol, dazed from jet lag and still queasy from turbulence, surrounded by Dutch voices and the familiar reality of her homeland, Queen Frederika found it almost impossible to believe that all that had really happened.

Within a few minutes they were in a car headed toward The Hague, and by two in the morning Saskia was back in the familiar confines of Huis ten Bosch. Lotte had already gone to sleep. On Saskia’s biological clock it was early evening. Moreover, she had made the tactical error of napping on the plane. She took a stroll around the grounds. Stars and a half-moon were visible in the south, but the northern half of the sky was a dark indigo blur as clouds, invisible in the dark, swept across it in advance of the summer storm. A faint hiss, building toward a roar, reached her ears from the ancient forest all around as the tops of the great trees, thick with late summer foliage, began to seethe and toss in the rising wind. Part of Saskia just wanted to pull up a chair and sit in the open and let the weather wash over her, but finally she was beginning to feel a little drowsy. She went inside and climbed at last into her own bed.

If it made sense to speak of a typical disaster, then this sounded as if it had been one of those until about halfway through breakfast. Wind and waves had first struck Frisia in the north and then worked their way down the coast. The occasional rogue wave had overtopped a dike, but none of the coastal defenses had been breached. Here and there, trees were down, roads awash, trucks and caravans flipped on their sides. To all appearances, it looked like Saskia would be headed to wherever her presence might actually be helpful. This, however, probably meant simply waiting until tomorrow. Showing up right on the heels of an active disaster just got in the way of relief efforts and made it look like she was pandering for a photo op.

Apparently she had slept through a loud crack that had raised a minor security alarm until the cause had been identified as a large bough—itself the size of a mature tree—snapping off a big oak a hundred meters outside the security fence. Plans were being made for her to walk out there with Lotte in an hour or so and be photographed marveling at it.

She was reviewing all this with Willem and other members of her staff when Lotte came down for breakfast. All the staff members broke off and quietly made themselves scarce as mother and daughter greeted each other with somewhat more than the usual amount of hugging and smooching. For the last couple of years, relations between queen and princess had been not exactly frosty, but distant and maybe even a little prickly in a way that was not really that unusual. Suddenly, somehow, the ice had been broken. Saskia knew why but none of the household staff did; they were content to slip out and finish their coffee in another room while mother and daughter caught up a little.

Once they sat down and looked at each other, Saskia saw that Lotte had put on makeup—not a huge amount—before coming down. She had mixed feelings about that. Lotte could do what she wanted with her body. But she’d put up a healthy resistance to the expectations that society placed on women in general and royals in particular and even earned a bit of a reputation as a young royal rebel-in-the-making. But now did not seem the right moment to broach that topic. Perhaps Lotte just anticipated that they would be going out in public soon to be photographed reacting to storm damage. The Haagse Bos was a public park. Anyone with a long lens could snap the occasional candid photo of a royal if they didn’t have anything better to do with their time.

Lotte returned the courtesy by not asking Saskia directly about the topic that had been the subject of so many text messages during the last few days. This would have been inadvisable anyway with staff in the next room. It was a curious thing about texting and other such faceless electronic communications that they enabled people to say things and to reveal sides of their personalities they’d have avoided in person. Certainly any stranger who had read some of the texts Lotte had sent to her mother in Texas would have formulated an image in their mind that was at odds with the somewhat unconventional but basically wholesome teenager now sitting across the table from Saskia, her strawberry blond hair in a loose braid falling down over the front of a powder blue T-shirt. Saskia just sat and gazed upon the girl for a few moments, pleasantly shocked, as all parents always were, by how she had grown and changed.

“What was all that about!?” Lotte asked.

“Texas?”

“Yes. I know the official story was that you were making a private visit to friends overseas, and you got delayed because of the hurricane. Fine. But I’m just wondering . . . ?”

“We should talk about it at some point, you and I. It was a conference about climate change.”

Lotte’s face registered approval.

“I know that this topic would be important to you, darling, even if it weren’t for—” And Saskia turned her hands palms up and sort of gestured in all directions. Meaning the incredibly bizarre fact that you are a princess living in a royal palace.

“Texas,” Lotte said. “I know the oil industry is very big there.”

Saskia conquered the urge to say something in a conversation-endingly didactic parental tone such as my sweet child, it is very big everywhere, and we own a good chunk of it. “It’s certainly more visible. Because it’s near the supply end. Where the oil comes out of the ground. Demand is all over, of course—more distributed, less obvious. Every car, every dwelling is part of it.”

“The air we breathe,” Lotte added. “That’s the dumping ground for all of it. Did you hear the branch crack in the night?”

“No, I slept through that!”

“I was thinking about that tree, taking carbon dioxide out of the air for so many centuries, converting it into wood by the ton, until it grew so heavy it could no longer support its own weight.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that light. But yes, that tree has seen a lot.”

“Maybe we could cut sections from the fallen branch—to show the tree rings going back to before the Industrial Revolution.” Lotte was just getting going on this idea when her phone buzzed and her eyes flicked briefly to it. Saskia, hardly for the first time, had to bridle her annoyance at the fact that this contraption was interrupting a perfectly good conversation. But Lotte was no stranger to multitasking. Her brow dimpled momentarily at whatever had come up on the phone—some kind of troubling news, apparently—and then she looked back into her mother’s eyes and returned to her theme. “Maybe there’s some kind of analysis that could be done in a lab. On that wood, I mean. On the different tree rings. Showing how a tree ring that was created two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, showed a lower amount of CO₂ in the air than the more recent rings.”

“It’s not my area of expertise,” Saskia answered, “but it seems quite plausible that such an analysis could be done.” She frowned and thought about it while Lotte diverted her gaze to her phone again and thumbed out a response. “Are you suggesting we send the fallen branch to such a lab for analysis? I’m not sure if it would be of any interest to scientists who do that sort of thing—”

Lotte executed a perfect teen eye roll and stuck the landing with a sigh. “Of course not, those people can get old pieces of wood anywhere. My point is that we are going to walk out there in a few minutes and get our photograph taken with that fallen branch, no? And what is the point of that? It’s to show people that we are aware that there was a windstorm. Fine. But there are other things going on besides windstorms that we need to show awareness of. So I’m just saying that when we are done getting our photo taken standing next to this fucking branch, instead of letting the maintenance crew haul it away and put it in a log chipper or whatever, maybe I cut some pieces out of it and use it as a way to show that we are also aware of bigger issues like climate change and the damage it causes.”

Saskia was just on the verge of saying that this was a wonderful idea when Lotte’s phone buzzed again and she stood up. “I’m worried about Toon,” she said. “I want to go to the beach.”

“Scheveningen?”

“Just north of there.”

“What’s going on with Toon?” This was a schoolmate of Lotte’s and a part of her social circle.

“He went surfing this morning, early. There are big waves today because of the storm. Something weird is happening—I can’t make sense of these messages.”

Saskia became aware that Willem was standing in a doorway. He was facing in her general direction, but she could tell from the movements of his eyes and his somewhat slack-jawed appearance that he was reading some virtual content in his glasses. “Your Majesty,” he said, “sorry to interrupt, but I have to make you aware that—”

“Something weird is happening at the beach?” Saskia guessed and exchanged a look with Lotte.

“I think it is possible that we have a major disaster happening as we speak.”

Saskia sat still and absorbed that for a moment.

Lotte slumped forward and put her forehead on her arms.

Sirens were sounding. Emergency vehicles passing through the Haagse Bos.

“Such as—what?” Saskia asked. “A mass shooting? A bomb? Shipwreck?”

“Something about foam.”

“What!?”

Willem shook his head helplessly. “That’s all I know.”

Saskia stood up. “Get the bicycles.”

Even bicycles were almost overkill. Huis ten Bosch was just a few thousand strides from the edge of the North Sea. They could have walked to it briskly in less than an hour. On bicycles, trailed by security and support staff in cars, they covered the distance in minutes.

Along this stretch of the North Sea coast, the basic shape of the land was a flat beach that grew wider or narrower according to the tides. Rising abruptly from that was a line of dunes, held together by scrubby vegetation that had found purchase in the loose sandy soil and survived the wind and spray that came off the sea almost continuously during much of the year. Inland of the dunes’ crest, the ground dropped lower and was spattered with small pools embedded in marshy ground. That described the coastline in its natural state from the Hook of Holland, a few kilometers south of The Hague, north as far as Frisia. The Hague’s bit of it was a popular recreational beach, serviced by a row of restaurants, bars, and so on built well back from the surf, nestled at the base of the steep bluff or strung out above along its brow. This, of course, was the high season for beachgoing. Conditions had been fine and warm until the onset of this morning’s weather.

That sort of development—the touristy stuff that you could see at any beach in the world—terminated abruptly as one went north up the beach past Scheveningen. Beyond a certain point there were suddenly no businesses, and very few human traces: just a long wire fence that had something to do with maintaining the dune, and a couple of reinforced concrete bunkers that the Nazis had embedded in the sand as part of their coastal defense system. A paved bicycle path ran along the top of the dune, but you couldn’t see that from below, just occasional wooden staircases linking it to the beach. Other than that, it was a nature preserve. During the winter, the place could be astonishingly deserted given that it was only a short walk from the capital of one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

An exception occurred whenever conditions of wind and sea combined to produce large waves. Then, this coastline drew surfers. They all had apps that alerted them when conditions were likely to be right. They would flock to whatever stretch of the Dutch coastline looked like it would have the biggest and best waves. Given the climate, they generally wore wet suits.

This morning, probably during the wee hours, those people had been awakened by those apps letting them know that conditions in a few hours’ time were going to be ideal at Scheveningen, and that waves could be expected that might only occur once in a decade.

Therefore, as Saskia and Lotte and their entourage pedaled westward over the landscape of dunes and potholes just inland of the beach, they were following in the footsteps and bicycle tracks of hundreds of surfers who had come the same way during the hours just before dawn, fighting their way up into the teeth of that wind. It was easy to see the traces they had left behind in the loose ground and various pieces of kit they had stashed in the lee of the dune line.

The crest of the dune—the highest prominence between them and the flat beach below—was now a ragged picket line of civilians, police, and aid workers, all looking down and out over the sea. They were strangely inactive. They had all been summoned here by some great spectacle, but having arrived, they didn’t know what to do besides look at it.

Saskia and her group pulled over and got out of the way of a fire truck that was trying to reach the shore along the same indistinct path. Then they followed it up and found their way into a gap between other onlookers where they could look out over the beach.

The beach appeared to be gone.

What they saw was so strange and so contrary to what they had expected that it took several moments for them even to make sense of the plain evidence of their eyes. Directly below them, only a few meters below the brow of the dune, a flat, featureless slab of dirty-yellow stuff was butted up against the slope. It extended from there all the way out to the North Sea, which was still slamming into it with great waves. But for all their power the waves did not move it. They simply dissolved into it. Even their sound was swallowed up.

Looking to the left and the right, Saskia could see that this phenomenon extended south to the pier and Ferris wheel at Scheveningen, and northward for at least an equal distance. Several kilometers of beach had been buried to a depth of a few meters beneath a featureless and disturbingly quiet slab of what appeared to be foam.

Still finding this difficult to believe, Saskia ventured down a short distance from the lip of the dune, wanting to inspect the stuff close up. It wasn’t that far below them. She could have poked it with a long stick. But the moment she broke ranks, an outcry came up. They had not even recognized her yet. She was just a random person to them. But all those who’d arrived earlier, all the police and aid workers, wanted her to know that under no circumstances should she descend one step farther.

“But it’s just . . . normal sea foam? Natural foam?” she asked.

“This is what the experts are saying,” Willem said. “You see it on the beach all the time, of course.”

“Of course! But just little puffs of it. Ropes of it along the surf line.”

“This is the same. Just . . . more of it. All concentrated along this stretch where the surf was strongest. It piled up on the beach faster than it could dissipate. It was trapped against the base of the dune. So it just piled up higher and higher. Faster than people could get away.”

Saskia was finally, only now, observing the nature of the rescue activities. A coast guard chopper, painted a vivid shade of yellow, was inbound over the sea. A couple of huge orange RHIBs were moving around offshore, carrying rescue divers, but it looked like they were largely preoccupied just managing their relationship to the incoming waves—trying not to become surfboards. Red fire trucks were continuing to show up along the paved bicycle path that ran along the top of the dune. One of them had been used to anchor ropes that had been tossed down into the foam. A fireman in full face respirator, with an air tank on his back, was trudging up out of it. He looked like someone who had been tarred and feathered. Every square inch of him was flocked with white foam. When he reached a safe altitude he unsnapped himself from the rope and made a gesture to colleagues above, who began to haul on the rope. After a few moments a body in a wet suit emerged from the foam. When it was safely up on dry ground, medics converged on it.

Other victims—many in wet suits—were lying supine on gurneys, or just on the ground. Rescue workers were forcing air into their lungs by squeezing rubber bags. Or at least that was the case for some of them. Others were just lying motionless. They were being zipped into body bags.

The fire truck deployed a hose and began to spray water down into the foam, easily carving a trench into it. This they widened by playing it from side to side. Soon they uncovered a still human form sprawled partway up the slope of the dune.

“You can’t breathe in that stuff,” Willem said. “It gets in your lungs. Nor can you swim out of it. You can only run, or rather wade, to some place where you might be able to breathe. But of course you can’t see where you’re going. A few of them made it to the top of the dune. A few went back down, trying to rescue the others.”

“How many?” Saskia asked, watching dully as the fire hose exposed another body, and another, within the space of a few meters.

“At least a hundred,” Willem said.

Willem’s job in such a situation was to be cold-blooded. This wasn’t necessarily in his nature. He was as shocked by all this as anyone else. It wasn’t completely unprecedented. There had been isolated cases of drowning in sea foam during the last few years. It had come up on the emergency services’ radar as something that would become more likely as the temperature of the sea rose and algae—which apparently had something to do with the formation of sea foam—flourished. But a mass casualty event of this type was completely astonishing.

That astonishment was over and above the natural feelings of grief that anyone would experience upon seeing so many lives lost. Only for a few minutes did Willem remain in that catatonic state. Then Princess Charlotte became very emotional as it became obvious to her that one or more of her friends might be lying dead on this beach somewhere. She ran off in the direction of a cluster of aid workers who were pulling body bags out of crates that had begun to arrive in police vans. The princess got a few meters’ head start before Queen Frederika lit out after her.

Amelia, who’d been on duty continuously for the last week, had a well-earned day off. But other members of the security team had swapped in for her. They jogged along roughly parallel to the royals. These people dressed specifically to blend in and not seem like armed goons, so they just seemed like extraordinarily fit and clean-cut citizens moving in a strangely intentional and coordinated fashion around two women, a mother pursuing a distraught teenager toward a row of wet-suited corpses.

So Willem’s job—again—was not to do as normal human emotion might dictate (plenty of people were doing that) or to see to the immediate physical security of the royals (that was already sorted) but to look a few hours or days ahead.

Obviously, today’s planned slate of activities was toast. He saw to that with a quick message thumbed out on his phone.

He did not follow the others but remained at the high vantage point on the dune, trying to assemble a picture of what was happening.

It was now obvious that they had arrived quite early to an event that was only starting to ramp up, and that would go on doing so for much of the day. This was Sunday morning and few people would be at work. As word spread, they would flock here to gawk or volunteer. Random circumstances—the extreme proximity to Huis ten Bosch, the messages on Lotte’s friend network—had caused the royals to arrive only minutes after the event (or during it? For he had the horrible thought that people might be down there now struggling for air).

Anyway, traffic to the beach was building rapidly. Twice as many were here now as had been when they arrived, and police were turning their attention to the problem of crowd control—since all who came here would have the same instinct to get up to the top of the dune. Some would inevitably blunder down into the foam as the result of clumsiness, curiosity, or ill-advised rescue attempts. So police vehicles were now arriving in numbers and they were setting up a cordon along the dune-top bicycle path.

The yellow search and rescue helicopter came in closer and settled low, trying to use its rotor wash to dispel the foam. A good idea on someone’s part. The down blast began to dig a bowl in the foam, exposing a circle of beach sand. The excavated foam flew outward in a myriad of small flecks that caught in the wind and filled the air like a blizzard.

All well and good but Willem still wasn’t doing his job. He turned his back on the sea and looked down the back slope of the dune to the little cluster of emergency vehicles where Princess Charlotte and Queen Frederika had stopped. The two of them were together. Charlotte was holding on to Frederika’s arm and resting her head on her mother’s shoulder—sweet, but awkward now that she was a few centimeters taller! The queen stood there stolidly and with perfect posture nodding as she was briefed by a young woman wearing a reflective vest. Everything about the body language told him with certainty that their brief spell of anonymity had come to an end. The queen had been recognized. Those around her had changed their behavior accordingly. She was getting a little status report from an emergency worker. Not because she’d asked for one. She would never do that. But because when you were a first responder at a disaster and suddenly you noticed the queen was standing right there, you delivered a status report.

A police officer was headed right toward him unreeling a roll of yellow crowd control tape and giving him the stink eye. Willem dodged out of his way. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket—he was no longer dressing like a random Texan—and pulled out a laminated security credential with an orange lanyard, which he slipped around his neck. No one was actually going to inspect it, but merely being a man of a certain age in a suit and an overcoat with a badge on a lanyard would afford him respect and access in whatever order was going to be imposed upon this chaos.

Press, as such, were only beginning to arrive. At first they would focus on documenting the tragedy and the efforts of the first responders. Inevitably there would be photographs of the queen and the princess. Random people on social media would post pictures of their own. What would those pictures show? A self-absorbed, out-of-touch monarch getting in the way of rescue operations? Or a woman of the people doing what any norMAL person would do in the wake of a disaster?

What was needed? Where was this operation understaffed?

Willem’s eye was drawn to a flatbed truck with military markings, cruising at a walking pace down a track in the lee of the dune. Soldiers were rolling boxes over the tailgate, depositing them on the sand every few meters. Willem had no idea what was in them.

A few moments later Willem was down below with the queen. She’d had the good sense to back off a few paces and let the first responders do the melancholy—and quite physically demanding—work of wrestling dead surfers into body bags. He said to her, “We need to get you away from the dead people. How about opening some boxes?”

“Yes,” she said, “set it up. Something that is actually helpful, please. We are going to try to find Lotte’s friend.”

He turned away and sent a two-word message:

> Need Fenna.

Then he went back to his official role of being as cold-blooded as was humanly possible.

He went and looked at the boxes that had been dumped out of the truck. They were labeled and barcoded in a way that was opaque to him.

Not far away, three people in reflective vests were standing around one of the boxes talking and pointing. He walked right up to them. Probably because of the suit and the lanyard, they stopped talking and looked at him. They were sipping coffee from go cups, in the manner of persons who had only just now showed up for work. “What is all this stuff and why is it here?” Willem asked. Anywhere else this might have come across as gruff, but it was how Dutch people communicated.

“Pop-up shelters, folding chairs and tables, emergency blankets, plastic ponchos, snacks,” said the oldest of the group, an Indo woman with graying hair in a ponytail.

Willem guessed, “Planned response to mass casualty events.”

“Yes. Lots of people are going to show up here in the next few hours. It’s going to rain. We need to keep those people sheltered but out of the way of the rescue operation. Workers need to be fed, to use the toilet, wash their hands. Victims need to re-connect with families.”

Willem nodded. “Do you need volunteers to help set this stuff up?”

Sizing him up, the woman replied using an Indonesian idiom that, roughly translated into English, meant fuck yes. The other two confirmed it with nods and expressions of relief.

Willem found Queen Frederika and Princess Charlotte a short distance from where he’d last seen them, in the lee of the dune. The princess was on her knees in the sand, hugging a boy in a wet suit who was seated on the ground looking stunned. Her friend Toon, apparently. He was flecked with foam, looking like a penguin chick covered with down. To borrow a phrase Willem had recently heard from Rufus, Toon looked like he’d seen some shit. The queen went over, bent down, and clasped the boy’s hand. People were taking pictures that would no doubt be up on social media within moments. That was fine. She looked a bit of a mess but no one would hold it against her.

After a decent amount of time had been spent on this project of letting the wayward Toon know how happy they were to see him alive, Willem got the royals moving in the direction of where volunteers were wanted. The security team naturally came along with them. This triggered a sort of herd instinct among those onlookers who were just milling around anyway, since they had been ejected from the top of the dune by the police. Space available for random citizens was shrinking, as lanes were staked out for heavy equipment trundling in from the city: red trucks with long multi-jointed cherry pickers that could reach down into the foam, ambulances, and so on. The royals might be doing the aid workers a favor just by drawing a few people away toward the rear. Which was the message Willem would put out later today on every social media outlet he had access to when anti-royalist cranks began slinging their mud at Queen Frederika. His phone was already buzzing with alerts. He piped the feed to his glasses. As he strolled along in the rearguard of this growing crew of volunteers, he scrolled through freshly posted images of the queen clasping Toon’s hand.

Someone slapped him on the ass. Fenna, blowing past him on her bicycle, cosmetics case lodged in the basket on its handlebars. Behind him a random old Dutchman, having observed this, made a quizzical/bawdy remark.

The volunteers got to work. Willem just stood off at a remove, watching it play on social media. He could sense some of the people looking askance at this weird old Indo, just standing there with his hands in the pockets of his thousand-euro overcoat while good ordinary citizens bent to the task of doing what they could in the face of this disaster. There was almost a level at which he relished being the asshole in cases like this.

He took the opportunity to skim through the last twenty-four hours’ work-related message traffic. Until half an hour ago, the biggest concern on his mind had been how to manage a wave of speculation and gossip that was starting to build around the whereabouts and activities of the queen during the last week. Going out to look at the fallen branch would have served the same purpose as displaying a photograph of a kidnapping victim holding up today’s newspaper. What the queen was doing right now was much better than that. They were going to win this news cycle. The livid royal-haters and creepy royal-stans flourished when nothing was happening and they had nothing to latch on to besides their own obsessions. This would silence them for perhaps three days, long enough for Queen Frederika’s weeklong Texas absence to be washed out of the nation’s attention span. Then Willem would have to think up something else. It would be comparatively easy since the queen’s Budget Day speech to the States General was coming up soon. This was a lot of work but was something of a self-licking ice cream cone by this point. There would be a lot of articles about the fancy hats that ladies would wear to the event. There would be a stink about the queen’s horse-drawn carriage, which was decorated with ancient, stereotypical paintings of colonized people.

So in a lot of ways Willem’s tasks were clearly plotted out for the next week and a half.

But. There was this looming question of how and when to come clean about the trip to Texas. T.R.’s staff had done a shockingly effective job of preventing word from getting out, so far. And the fact that he had fired the gun eighteen times in a day without anyone noticing was simply mind-blowing. But tomorrow—now that the White Label geeks had finished crunching the numbers on that first salvo—the big gun at Pina2bo would go into action again, firing shells into the stratosphere around the clock. Even if no one connected Queen Frederika to the Pina2bo trip, she’d eventually be asked her opinion of solar geoengineering. Willem already had press releases cued up that he would fire off if word started to leak. But for now, the official story seemed to be holding up: She had taken a bit of time off for a personal visit to a friend in the Houston area (most people would make the obvious assumption that it was someone connected with Royal Dutch Shell) and had been detained for a few extra days because of disruptions related to the hurricane. While there, she had visited some locations related to climate change and sea level rise.

Which was all true.

Back to the here and now. A moment was going to come when it was time to extract the royals and get them back to Huis ten Bosch. A little of this kind of thing went a long way. All the good pictures had already been taken. He knew what the front pages of the newspapers were going to show tomorrow and it would be fantastic. Staying here for hours wouldn’t make it any better. They might draw crowds that would impede rescue operations.

He saw a gray-haired man pull up on a bicycle, go halfway up the dune, and turn around with a pair of binoculars. No interest in the tragedy just on the other side of the dune. He’d come here just to get a look at the queen. There would be others like him; they just hadn’t gotten here yet.

Willem noted with approval that the security team had relocated the cars to within a few meters of where the queen was at work spraying disinfectant on plastic tables. They could extract her on a few moments’ notice at any point.

It was up to her, of course. She could leave whenever she wanted. But Willem’s job was to keep an eye on the overall scene, notice things that she wouldn’t, and make discreet suggestions. The time was not now. She’d only just got to work. Leaving too soon would make this seem too much like a cynical photo op. She ducked into one of the cars with Fenna for a routine upgrade, then spelled the princess while she got the same. Willem checked his watch. Maybe another half hour of this would make sense. By then the rescue workers would have found as many bodies as they were going to find, the scale of the disaster would be known. The queen could make a statement on camera and then go back to Huis ten Bosch for a hot lunch and an afternoon nap.

An expensive car was admitted through the security cordon and rolled up to the base of the dune. Out stepped Ruud Vlietstra, the prime minister. He drew attention for a few minutes as he went up to the top of the dune for a look-see and a briefing. The interior minister showed up minutes later on an electric bicycle. All these people had flats practically within walking distance, and most such people were likely to be in The Hague now during the run-up to Budget Day.

Bodies kept coming over the top of the dune. The relentless gradualness of it was a special kind of horror. He kept waiting for the moment when some kind of all clear would be sounded. But it just never stopped. He found a bird’s-eye video feed on the Internet and watched it in his glasses. The fucking beach was still covered in foam! The sea was vomiting it up as fast as it could be removed. Its overall level seemed to be subsiding, though.

Photos of mostly young, healthy-looking surfers began to cover a portable whiteboard that had been set up under a canopy. The friends and family members collected in a waiting area where they milled about hugging each other or sat on folding chairs staring into the distance and sipping hot tea. From time to time a rescue worker would descend from the triage area up on the dune and call out a name. The name of a dead person. One or two or five people would converge on them and hear a few low solemn words and then break out in sobbing and wailing.

It was just utterly, fantastically awful and it went on and on and on.

Queen Frederika had finished doing setup work and was now just roaming through the waiting area clasping people’s hands, admiring the photos they’d brought of their missing sons and daughters, muttering words of comfort. Most people had the decency not to take pictures.

Willem stationed himself in the queen’s eye line and just stood there. Gradually in a two steps forward, one step back cadence she drew closer. There was a wordless understanding that as soon as she reached him they would leave. Willem communicated that fact to the security team. Finally the moment arrived. The queen wound up her last, sad, hand-clasping conversation with a ruined surfer mom, accepted a curtsy (Mom was all in for old-school royalist etiquette), and turned around into a horseshoe of aides and security, centered on Willem. This became a loose flying wedge that got her out into a light drizzling rain and into the car. The bicycles had presumably been seen to.

In the moments before the cars pulled away, Willem had an opportunity to survey the crowd that had gathered on the outside of the cordon. The inevitable flower mound had begun to accumulate. Candles, tricky in this weather, were also being attempted. People were waving Dutch flags and holding up rain-streaked hard copies of surfers’ selfies. And there were just a few complete assholes—there were always these people, the feral swine of the political ecosystem—who could not see this tragedy as anything other than an opportunity to show up in public and wave their fucking idiotic signs around. Since the royal house was, in theory, above politics, such persons were usually more of an annoyance or curiosity than a central concern. However, some were insanely pro- or anti-royal and so it behooved Willem to pay attention. Not wanting to be obvious, he activated a feature in his glasses that turned them into a camera, then quickly scanned the crowd, silently snapping a picture whenever he saw a sign being thrust into the air. Then he got into the back seat of the car that was waiting for him.

The drive back to Huis ten Bosch took all of about three minutes. Willem spent most of it holding Fenna’s hand and trying to get her settled down. She was more freaked out than at any time since the plane crash. She didn’t know any of the surfers but the whole scene had really upset her, perhaps because the victims reminded her of her darling Jules in Louisiana.

When they were back at the royal residence, though, and Willem had a moment to himself in his little office there, he reviewed the photos he had captured just before getting into the car. One detail was bothering him, to the point where he was questioning his own memory.

It was a woman of perhaps forty holding up a hastily hand-lettered sign reading

erdd a false idol

and adorned in the corners with crosses and Stars of David.

Typical religious wack job stuff in every way. But ERDD? He had never heard of ERDD. Or rather he had, of course. But in a very different context. Just last week. Ecological Restoration of Delta Distributaries was a defunct crowdfunded nonprofit that Dr. Margaret Parker had told him about over coffee in New Orleans. Its initials had been stenciled across the back of the reflective vest she’d loaned him. He still had the vest, folded up in his luggage. He meant to send it back to her with a thank-you note once he’d had a chance to launder it.

All the Germanic languages had words like “Erda,” meaning Earth, or (in a mythological context, which was presumably the mindset of the sign brandisher) a deity personifying the earth. Mother Earth, basically. Willem did a bit of googling and satisfied himself that there was no language in any branch of the Germanic family tree in which “Erdd” was an accepted spelling.

The “false idol” reference, the crosses and the stars, made it plain that the sign maker was using ERDD in some religious way. To the extent he could peer inside this woman’s mind, she seemed to be suggesting that people who worshipped the false idol of Earth—Greens, presumably?—were committing a kind of heresy and that the foam disaster was an omen, a punishment.

Willem did a few more searches, this time linking the word to religious terms, and began to land some hits. They were intermingled with old references to Margaret’s group in Louisiana, as well as to other entities that used that acronym. This muddied the waters until he hit on the idea of limiting the search to pages that had been changed within the last year. Then he found a number of ERDD references that seemed to align with whatever was going on in the brain of the sign-holding lady. Most of them were in Dutch. They were cropping up on message threads and social media groups of a decidedly political nature: anti-Greens and anti–lots of other things.

He had already spent more time on this than it was likely to be worth, but he couldn’t stop clicking. It was a lot of right-wing types becoming frothingly enraged because they had been tagged, with surgical precision, in postings on a few Green, tree-huggerish feeds that were all about ERDD as a kind of synthetic umbrella deity for everything related to environmentalism. These Greens were making no bones about it. They weren’t claiming to have rediscovered a lost religion. They were cheerfully admitting right up front that they’d just made it all up, like dungeon masters prepping for an all-night Dungeons and Dragons session. There was one feed where the people who were boosting this idea were stating their case and tagging exactly the kinds of right-wingers who could most be relied upon to respond furiously as all their cultural and religious buttons were mashed to a point that had basically driven them mad.

Now, as T.R. would have put it, this was not Willem’s first rodeo. So as he surveyed the ERDD feeds, he saw all sorts of clues that made it obvious to him that it was all fake. No one actually believed in ERDD. The sole purpose of this stuff was to induce a backlash.

He had been sifting through all this for at least half an hour when it finally occurred to him to start looking at the dates when it had been posted. Those were, of course, perfectly easy to see; he just hadn’t been paying attention to them.

But now he scrolled back through all his open tabs and discovered that every bit of this stuff had gone up within the last five days.

He went back and compared it against his calendar, allowing for time zones. Not a trace of it had existed anywhere prior to his visit to the Mississippi Delta, his tour of the diversion, and his conversation with Bo.

During which Bo had snapped a picture of the ERDD vest drying out on a coat hanger.

Now, there were certain things that Willem would only discuss with the queen. Others he would without hesitation bring to the attention of the security team, the police, or Dutch intelligence. Matters of a more personal and informal nature he might chat about with Fenna. But there were certain things you could only talk about with your husband. This was one of those.

Willem excused himself for the day and took the train up to Leiden, fifteen kilometers north. He walked to the flat that he shared with Remigio. Typically for this area, it was in a post-war building, but constructed at a pre-war scale, so that it blended reasonably well with those older buildings that had survived. It looked out over a canal and it was conveniently located with respect to the university buildings where Remigio pursued his career as a history professor.

Last night Willem had just thrown his stuff down. His bag was still sitting on the floor with Walmart clothes and Flying S swag spilling out of it. He rooted through it and found the ERDD vest. He unfolded it, put it on the back of a chair, and photographed it, just to prove he wasn’t out of his mind.

Then he pulled on his new cowboy boots and walked to the pub.

Remigio was Portuguese. He was a decade younger than Willem but looked even younger than that thanks to lucky genes and assiduous skin care. He’d come up to Leiden to do Ph.D. research on the migration of expulsed Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula to the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. They’d liked him well enough that they’d offered him a job, and he’d liked the Amsterdam nightlife well enough that he’d accepted it. After a decade of that he’d “settled down” in Leiden, which was where he and Willem had met. They had a happy and stable life together.

The battery of viral tests that Willem had gone through at Schiphol had come back with generally favorable results that had been duly piped into PanScan, which had deemed it acceptable for him to sit under an umbrella at a canal-side pub, provided it wasn’t too crowded, and have a beer with his husband.

But he just couldn’t bring himself to tell Remi about ERDD. The sudden intimacy of being back with him, the norMALness of the pub, the canal traffic gliding to and fro—the very smallness and neatness of this old Dutch town—just made it inconceivable. To mention this insane Internet stuff would be like tossing garbage into the canal.

“This thing in Texas, Remi. It is all about geoengineering. You are going to hear about it eventually.”

“Sounds as if I’m hearing about it now!” Remigio quipped.

“I mean, on the news. Internet.”

“I know what you mean, Wim.”

“What does that make you think of?”

“What, geoengineering?”

“Yes.”

“Are you using me as a focus group?” This was an old joke between them. Willem ignored it and let the question dangle. Remigio gazed out over the canal, took a sip of beer, then grimaced and cocked his head from side to side in an on the one hand . . . on the other hand way. “I recoil.”

“How so?”

“I feel like the Greens are going to give me an earful about how terrible it is.” With comically exaggerated paranoia, Remi looked around to see whether any university folk were in earshot. “It is terrible, right?” His eyebrows were raised in mock horror.

“It cools things down, but it doesn’t fix ocean acidification, which is a real problem. People don’t approve of even talking about it.”

“Ahh, I’ve lost track of all the things I can get in trouble for even talking about.”

“Exactly, so it creates a bubble. One goes for years without hearing it mentioned. Because it is such a strict taboo. But then, one goes to Texas and . . .” Willem pointed both index fingers up in the air and pretended to fire six-guns with abandon, à la Yosemite Sam, while making “Kew! Kew!” sound effects.

Remigio nodded. “Texas. Nice boots, by the way.”

“Thank you. Yes. You’ve never been there, have you?”

“No.”

“It is this whole vast country-within-a-country where some people don’t have the slightest compunction about . . .”

“Discussing the forbidden topic?”

“Fuck discussing it, they’re actually doing it. Actual geoengineering. It’s happening. The queen and I saw it.”

“These Texans want her to support it?”

“I don’t exactly know. They’re not stupid. They understand that her role is ceremonial.”

Remigio considered that. “All right, let’s consider the alternative. These Texans could have pored over the Grondwet and then invited the minister of climate policy. Or the prime minister, even.”

Willem shook his head. “Impossible. The committees that would have gotten involved . . . the leaks . . . the politics . . . just unthinkable.”

“So,” Remi said, “when politics reaches that point where so many things are unthinkable . . . impossible . . . taboo . . . does, maybe, the queen begin to have real power again?”

“Yes. That’s the simple answer. Yes. But she shouldn’t.”

“Because Saskia is such a terrible and irresponsible tyrant?” Remi asked. Just teasing him.

“Of course not. Nor will Princess Charlotte be when it’s her turn. It’s just that this is not how it’s supposed to work.”

“And yet,” Remigio said, “we have a queen. And she has your loyalty.”