Termination Shock

The Hague

A curious thing about Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was that, once she had got accustomed to being in a new setting—which never took more than a couple of hours—it was as if she’d never been anywhere else. When she’d been in Texas, answering to “Saskia” and floating down the Brazos, or tucking into some brisket at T.R.’s mega gas station in the suburbs of Houston, it had taken mere moments for her to forget about the fact that she was the scion of a royal family that went back many generations and lived in palaces in a faraway country. She was fully immersed in the moment of chopping the celery with Mary Boskey or screwing Rufus on the train, and that was that. She could have kept riding that train forever.

By the same token, however, when she got back home it was as if none of that stuff in Texas had ever happened. Once the bug bites had stopped itching, it was as if she’d never left the familiar confines of Huis ten Bosch. She actually wondered if this feature of her personality qualified her as some kind of sociopath. It wasn’t as if she had no family at home. Her family was vast, and today—the third Tuesday in September—she was going to see most of them. And yet the only connecting thread that had remained intact while she’d been in Texas had been the exchange of messages between her and Lotte.

There was only one exception to this weird ability to feel at home in random places: Noordeinde Palace, the official “working palace” of the Dutch monarchy. She could never get used to this place. It was in The Hague, really just a few minutes’ walk from Huis ten Bosch, but surrounded by streets instead of trees. Rooms of enormous size with doors and windows of enormous dimensions connected by enormous hallways lined with vast old paintings, all seeming even more comically enormous in contrast to the overall small tidiness of the Netherlands. The palace did not just have a vestibule. It did not just have two. It had three consecutive vestibules. This might have been quite useful back in the days when affairs of state required the receiving of dignitaries according to elaborate protocols while making sure they didn’t freeze to death. The English idiom “cooling one’s heels” might have been coined by a British diplomat awaiting an audience with some past king of the Netherlands in the days before central heating. The overall decoration scheme was blindingly white and glacially stark. The past couple of monarchs had made efforts to enliven it with colorful modern touches, but these felt stuck on, and only emphasized the glabrous obduracy of the underlying structure. This had probably worked back in the era when men and women both wore much fancier clothing. Nowadays, it just added to the overall chilly alienation.

Today—the late morning of Third Tuesday—it was as lively as it would ever be. The protocol was that various members of the royal household would emerge from a certain door and, in full view of television cameras and a throng of (mostly happy, royal-loving) onlookers safely cordoned on the other side of a massive wrought-iron fence, climb into antique horse-drawn carriages for a journey of less than a mile to the Binnenhof, which was the seat of the Dutch government. The last to leave the palace and to arrive at the Binnenhof would be the queen, who upon her arrival (in a fairy-tale golden carriage) would be escorted into a big room called the Ridderzaal—literally, the Knight’s Hall—and read out a speech that the prime minister had written for her. Or rather the Council of Ministers and their aides had contributed bits and the PM had pulled it all together.

Anyway, as far as the overall scene in Nordeinde Palace was concerned: Saskia’s immediate family might be tiny, as it consisted of just her and Lotte, but the extended family was quite vast, as Saskia’s siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and so on seemed to know all about the birds and the bees. They didn’t all get together that often, but when they did, there were enough of them to make even Noordeinde Palace seem lively. Not all of them would make the journey through the streets of The Hague to the Binnenhof—there weren’t enough seats in the Ridderzaal, and anyway it was supposed to be a serious occasion of state. But they were all here. And the few notables who were going to be walking down that short stretch of red carpet and clambering into those carriages were all wearing the fanciest clothes, hair, and makeup one could get away with nowadays. So a lot of fuss and bother was happening in connection with that—enough to spill over into some of those vestibules and salons that otherwise rarely saw much use.

To judge from the sounds of laughter and happy exclamations ricocheting like musket balls up the punishingly hard flat surfaces of the palace’s grand staircase, everyone else was having a good time. But today was all about Queen Frederika. It was a truism that, at your own wedding, you never actually got to have a real conversation with all the dear friends and family who had gathered to celebrate it. Likewise, her job this morning would be to descend that staircase on cue, air-kiss a lot of cousins, climb into the golden carriage without falling off her heels, jump out at the Ridderzaal, and read the damned speech. Unlike a lot of those family members, who were dressed as if for the Academy Awards, she was in a pretty sensible outfit. Not that she didn’t like dressing up. But the point of the exercise, at the end of the day, was to open Parliament so they could get cracking on budget negotiations. To amaze the world with a fashion-forward frock was a goal that could maybe be postponed for some other occasion. So she was in a long dress, deep blue, with bits of orange that flashed out of darts and pleats and linings as she moved around. The designer had insisted that it was inspired by military uniforms. Saskia didn’t see the resemblance at all, but she wasn’t a fashion designer.

She had been getting prepped in one of the vast echoing rooms at the top of the stairs. Fenna, and the fashion designer responsible for the dress, had established their respective base camps at one end of this space. At the other, Saskia was having an unexpected last-minute check-in with Ruud.

Ruud was the prime minister. Technically speaking, he was her prime minister. He’d popped in through the back door with an emended copy of the speech.

“We did not expect,” Ruud said, “that this thing was actually going to go into operation.”

He did not even need to specify that “this thing” was the Biggest Gun in the World.

Saskia sighed. “We didn’t expect a lot of things.” She was referring to the pigs. This had been much on her mind of late. Everyone who knew about the plane crash was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But apparently in Texas you could just crash jet airplanes, shoot it out with giant predators on the tarmac, set fire to the wreckage, and flee, and no one would get particularly excited about it. The story had simply disappeared. No one cared. The government of the Netherlands, eight thousand kilometers away, was the closest thing to adult supervision in the matter. They had taken the action of grounding Saskia pending the completion of what was promised to be a discreet, yet thorough, investigation.

They had the power to do this. To ground Saskia, that is. She couldn’t blame them really. The deal was that the monarch was personally above reproach, but the PM was responsible. She could go out and murder someone and the prime minister would take the heat. Oh, he wouldn’t go to jail, but he’d have to resign and the government would fall along with him. So her very inviolability created a peculiar co-dependency with the PM. Whenever they felt like it, the Dutch government could cut the budget and curtail the powers—what was left of them, anyway—of the royals. Saskia—the whole monarchy, really—served at their pleasure. If she behaved in a way that created serious inconvenience for them—forcing PMs to fall on their swords and governments to collapse—consequences would follow. She and Ruud had daggers at each other’s throats. Not because they were dagger-to-the-throat kinds of people—Ruud was the very definition of a Euro-technocrat—but because that’s how the Grondwet had been written.

Ruud was a few years older than her, but other than a few lines in his face, seemed to have stopped aging at thirty-nine. If his hair was graying, he hid it by shaving his head. His rimless glasses were nearly invisible and didn’t seem to actually do anything—what sort of prescription was that, anyway? A strict one-beer-a-day policy combined with intermittent fasting and lots of bicycling made things very easy for whatever tailor was putting together his wardrobe of black, navy blue, and charcoal suits.

“Are you talking about the plane?” he said. “Last I heard, the insurance company—”

“They are no longer claiming that feral swine are an act of God. They will pay for the plane. If they don’t, I will just liquidate some of my Shell stock and pay for it out of pocket, just to make this go away. They won’t have to sue Waco for not properly maintaining the fence.”

“Fence?”

Saskia tried to suppress a sigh. Usually, Ruud was better prepared. “The fence that the pigs went under. To get on the runway and crash the plane.”

Ruud was momentarily torn between the fascinating and distracting topic of the jet/pig/alligator thing in Waco, and why he was actually here. He looked vaguely out a volleyball-court-sized window into a sea of orange-clad Dutch royalists. One could sense the prime ministerial superego calling to him faintly, as if from a great distance: Ruud! Ruud! Come back to me! It is Budget Day!

And then he was back. “I’m talking about—”

“I know what you’re talking about.”

“We thought we were being very clever. What we expected was that you, in your capacity as a private citizen, would accept this invitation to go to some dinners and parties in Texas and view this experimental curiosity that T.R. was fooling around with on his farm.”

“Ranch.”

“Whatever. Then you would come back and we would talk about it and I would decide, in consultation with the Council of Ministers of course, what position we ought to adopt.”

“It did actually seem like a reasonable plan a month ago,” Saskia said.

“We did not expect,” Ruud said, slapping the palm of one hand with the revised draft of the speech, “that it would go into operation. Full round-the-clock operation! Actually re-engineering the climate of the whole planet!”

“Of course we didn’t.”

“And now there are rumors and leaks. People are connecting the dots.”

“That I was there?”

“Yes. Which is all right, provided we get out ahead of it and make a statement.” Ruud had the habit, which now that Saskia had noticed it was beginning to get on her nerves, of lapsing into English mid-sentence when he wanted to drop in buzz phrases, like “connecting the dots” or “get out ahead of it.” Though, come to think of it, maybe that was preferable to letting that kind of talk seep into the Dutch language and clutter it up with faddish garbage.

“You want me to talk about this, specifically, half an hour from now!?”

Ruud shook his head. “Not Texas specifically. It would be a distraction, as you know. But to avoid confusion—if the whole story does come out—we can preempt it by issuing a policy statement against geoengineering.” He shook the papers. “Which I have inserted into this new draft. I just wanted to mention it to you so you won’t be surprised by the new wording when you come across it.” He paused and gave a little shrug. “I don’t know if you rehearse the speech—try to commit portions of it to memory—”

“I don’t. But I very much appreciate the consideration you have shown me by ducking in to give me this ‘heads-up.’” There. Now she’d done it too. But it triggered a memory of Rufus using that phrase in his dually, after the plane crash, and Alastair nearly being decapitated by a branch. Now she had to suppress a smile at the memory of that moment of slapstick.

Ruud noticed this and didn’t know what to make of it. He was now regarding her with just a trace of concern. “The least I could do,” he said. “Are you all right with this?”

On one level—the Grondwet level—this was a purely rhetorical question. It didn’t matter whether she was all right with it. Her job was to read the bloody speech. But it did actually matter.

“Is this the first time,” Saskia asked, “that the government has issued such a sweeping, blanket condemnation of geoengineering?”

“To my knowledge, yes.”

“Do you actually consider that to be a coherent policy? For a country such as ours that is, to a large extent, below sea level and kept in existence solely through, dare I say it, geoengineering?”

Ruud got a faintly disappointed look on his face and checked his watch, as if to say There isn’t time for me to explain these basic realities to you. There was an upwelling of crowd noise from outside. A horse-drawn carriage, not quite as magnificent as the queen’s but still richly encrusted with gold leaf, was entering the gates of the palace courtyard to collect the first members of the household. Horseshoes and iron wheel rims clattered on the paving stones as it swept round in a wide curve—the turning radius of these things was atrocious—that took it up to the door below. Nearby, a military band struck up a patriotic song.

“Let me guess,” Saskia said, “you’re about to tell me that it’s not about what you, or your party, actually think is the best policy. It’s about politics.”

Ruud now looked slightly less disappointed. He blinked and waited, eyes darting once or twice to the scene below, which looked not much different from how it would have during the days of Napoleon. But with jarring modern touches: the grenadiers in their red uniforms and tall bearskin caps shouldered NATO M16s, not muskets.

Ruud was the leader of the center-right party that in general got the most votes and anchored the ruling coalition. But there always had to be a coalition of some sort; in this country, it never happened that one party got enough votes to form a government all by itself. Ruud’s party had to form that coalition with parties that were either to the right or to the left of it. It had been the case for the last few years that Ruud was able to get almost all the votes he needed from a party that was more conservative. It was not quite a fringe party. It did, however, include a fair number of climate change skeptics. New elections were coming up next year and the big center-left party was predicted to make a strong showing. By forming a coalition with single-issue parties on the far left they might be able to wrest the government away from Ruud’s party.

So Ruud was guarding his left flank here. Throwing a bone—blanket condemnation of geoengineering schemes—to the Greens, to blunt the force of the opposition’s campaign next year. He had probably been up all night hitting “refresh” on numerous browser tabs, watching his political foes “connect the dots” on Saskia’s trip to Texas and the Pina2bo bombshell. This made him potentially responsible—according to the letter of the Grondwet—for any fallout. Inserting this language into the queen’s speech would serve a dual purpose of protecting not just Ruud but Saskia as well from the repercussions of T.R.’s actions in Texas.

Saskia had pulled the speech from Ruud’s hand. She allowed him to meditate over the weird cosplay scene below while she flipped through the pages looking for the section about the klimaat nood, the climate emergency. This over the last few Third Tuesdays had been working its way steadily up the agenda and occupying more space on the page. Pocking hooves and grinding wheel rims announced the departure of that first carriage.

She found it and read it under her breath. In her peripheral vision she could see Fenna sneaking up on her in the comically exaggerated mincing tiptoe gait, owing a lot to vintage Warner Brothers cartoons, that she used when she was well aware that she was annoying Saskia in the middle of more important duties. The dressmaker was drafting along behind Fenna, like a bike racer allowing a stronger rider to break the wind. Moments later she could feel deft hands messing with her hair and her skirts.

“I realize that you wrote this ten minutes ago . . .” Saskia said.

“More like an hour. Traffic was unbearable.”

“But taken literally it would mean we are going to turn off the pumps. Allow the dikes to melt away. Decommission the Maeslantkering. That’s the literal meaning of what you’ve written here. Which I know is not what you mean. But you are just handing the right wing an opportunity to make fun of you. ‘Look, he’s just virtue signaling, he doesn’t actually mean a word of this.’ So . . . perhaps here?” She placed a recently manicured fingernail, still redolent of volatile organic solvents, on a phrase in the text.

Ruud took it from her, tilted it toward the light, read it, and nodded. Fenna swung in between them like a basketball player boxing out a defender and had a last go with a makeup brush. The Golden Coach was approaching.

Saskia heard a faint metallic snick as Ruud drew a pen—she couldn’t see it, but it would be some tour de force of minimalist industrial design, made of metals from the far reaches of the Periodic Table—from his breast pocket. “I’ll add a few words,” he said, “just so you-know-who doesn’t jump down our throats.” He referred to Martijn Van Dyck, the charismatic leader of the far-right party, who could be relied upon to notice what Saskia had noticed, and to point it out, if the Queen of the Netherlands came out in opposition to dikes and windmills. “See you there, Your Majesty.”

Willem just walked. It was the easiest thing to do, and it felt good to stretch his legs. It wasn’t much more than a kilometer from his office in Noordeinde Palace to the Binnenhof, and the authorities had cleared the way by lining the route with crowd control barriers. A few royal superfans had begun showing up last night to stake out the best viewing spots. For their efforts they were now reaping the reward of standing with their bellies to the barricades where their predominantly orange clothing and accessories were on glorious display. Many had brought banners that they had zip-tied to the barricades themselves. As long as these were handmade and in reasonably good taste they were allowed to remain.

Not everyone was willing to sleep rough on the streets of The Hague just to get a glimpse of the queen’s hand waving in the window of the golden carriage. For those slackers, bleachers had been set up, well back of the barricades, so that they could sit in reasonable comfort and view the procession from a higher, more distant vantage point. The whole route was lined with police in dark uniforms with high-vis stripes across the chest. These stood closest to the barricades, backs turned to the procession, facing the crowd. They were reinforced by an inner layer of security consisting of military, in modern uniforms, backs to the crowd, facing the queen as she rolled by.

The procession that moved through all this was a historical mishmash. Many of the soldiers flanking the carriages, and the officers and dignitaries walking, or riding horses, alongside of it, were dressed as their forebears might have been two hundred years ago when the Dutch monarchy in its modern form had been instituted, post-Napoleon. So, a lot of knee breeches, white stockings, gold braid, and the kinds of hats usually seen on the heads of admirals in old movies. But many who walked in the procession—for it never moved at anything more than an easy walking pace—simply wore modern, albeit very formal, clothes. This included Willem who was in his blackest suit. He had not spoken to Queen Frederika today, nor would he have expected or wanted to. This would have meant that something had not gone according to plan. He had personally seen to the hasty arrangements for Ruud’s last-minute check-in. This was unusual but hardly unheard of, and was, in the end, really just the system working as it was supposed to.

He knew what it was that was on Ruud’s mind, since it had been on Willem’s mind too, and he very much liked Ruud’s solution. As a matter of fact, he liked it so much that it had, paradoxically, ratcheted up his own anxiety level. They had a fix worked out for the whole situation with T.R. and Pina2bo and all that. It only required the queen reading certain words from a piece of paper. That accomplished, people might then still criticize her for having gone to Texas at all. But she could dissociate herself, and by extension the government, from what T.R. was up to, by saying that she had only gone there on a fact-finding mission; and having acquainted herself with the facts, wholeheartedly concurred with the government’s position. Then this whole thing would be behind them.

All this would happen in less than half an hour’s time. But it seemed half a year to Willem, who, now that a solution was within his grasp, felt impatient with the slowness of horse-drawn transport. He longed in a strange way for the days of COVID when they had eschewed the antique carriage and the horses in favor of gray Audis. He bridled his impatience and tried to enjoy the walk. It was a nice enough day, though too hot. Not as hot as Texas, thank god. The crowds who turned up for this thing were overwhelmingly pro-royal, and so just walking among them and listening to their cheering and singing was a balm to his soul, torched as it was by late-night encounters with trolls, lunatics, and nefarious bot networks on the Internet.

During the foam disaster at Scheveningen, a photo had gone viral of the queen in a tent scrubbing down a plastic folding table with a rag and a spray bottle. This had become iconic, probably because it was an apt callout to the old stereotype of Dutch women scrubbing steps, sidewalks, and anything else that was not able to run away from their hygienic fervor. But at the same time it was modern, and nicely re-contextualized into this sudden and astonishing disaster. It was Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia manifesting in her Saskia avatar: the farmer’s wife. So people had printed up large copies of that picture to put on signs and banners, and some had even laminated the full-body life-sized image onto foam core so that, from place to place along the route, it looked as if “Saskia” were standing there scrubbing the galvanized steel railings of the barricades. Garlands of orange flowers and cardboard crowns adorned some of these.

It would have been a little weird, a little wrong, if 100 percent of the spectators had been pro-royal and pro-government, and so protest banners were interspersed with the fan art. Up on the highest rows of the bleachers, signs in a more deprecatory vein could be seen thrust into the air. Some took issue with specific policies of Ruud’s government. Others denounced the whole idea of having a monarch. Others yet were just incomprehensible.

All perfectly normal. But Willem took care to read them and to take discreet pictures. The great majority reflected positions of minority parties or pressure groups with which he was already familiar. But he didn’t want to be blindsided by anything new.

As the procession came around a bend, entering the home stretch for the Binnenhof, he spied a row of protesters—or at least he assumed they were protesting something—who had staked out a few meters of space on the uppermost tier of a bleacher and deployed a banner made from a couple of bedsheets joined together. It read, simply, ZGL. Next to that was a crude cartoon—some sort of animal. Primitive heraldry.

Willem had never heard of the ZGL, though something about it did stir a faint memory. The “Z” immediately made him worry that it stood for “Zionist” something or other, and fringe groups obsessed with Zionism always went straight to the top of his list of nutjobs to worry about. So he snapped a picture.

As they got into the immediate district of the Binnenhof, the crowds peeled away and the procession trundled over a canal bridge and squeezed through a couple of narrow, ancient gates. Then it disassembled itself in a highly programmed way. There was music, if fifes and drums qualified. The whole point of all this was for Queen Frederika to enter the Ridderzaal, and it was of the essence that she go in last. Willem pulled his credentials out of his pocket and used these to enter through a side door. He found his seat in the Ridderzaal while the band was playing and the ceremonial stuff was happening out front. He’d thereby skipped a lot of preparatory ceremony. While they’d been hoofing it through the streets, the president of the Senate had banged his gavel and opened Parliament with a little speech in which he’d introduced the various cabinet members in attendance as well as representatives of Aruba, Curaçao, and St. Maarten—remnants of the Dutch Empire that still looked to Frederika as their head of state.

Moments after Willem arrived, the doors opened, the queen was announced, and everyone stood up. A brass fanfare played and she was escorted in by the Speaker of the House. She made her way up the aisle, nodding to various notables she recognized along the way. She climbed a few steps up a rostrum to the actual throne. This was just an inordinately large, slabby chair with an overhanging canopy of carved Gothic stuff. Everyone sat down, the room got quiet, and she read the speech, word for word.

It started with a moment of silence for the victims of the recent foam disaster: eighty-nine in all.

Traditionally the speech began with a summary of major events during the past year, especially insofar as those might bear on the budget. This one was no exception. It would have seemed odd to open with a mention of the Scheveningen disaster and then pivot away from climate change, and so that was the first general topic covered in the speech.

As everyone in the room knew perfectly well, there were no new moves that could really be made in the political dance around climate change. All the parties in the governing coalition, and most of those in the States General, agreed that the climate was changing and sea level rising and that humans had something to do with it. The farther right one stood, the more likely one was to insist that the danger was overblown, and to resist any proposed actions that the government might take in the way of emissions reduction, carbon capture, and so forth. This was a losing battle, and had been for a long time, but it gave the right-wing fringe parties political currency that they could spend elsewhere. Their bitter denunciations of governments’ heavy-handed meddling in free markets got them nowhere when it came to actually influencing public policy, but it raked in votes from conservative citizens and money from like-minded donors, which they could take advantage of in other areas, such as clamping down on immigration and making everything perfect for the Netherlands’ twenty-five remaining farmers. All the major parties, in and out of the coalition, agreed that man-made climate change was real and that its significance was huge, especially for the Netherlands. They differed only in their estimation of how extreme the government’s response to it should be.

But geoengineering per se had, by consensus, been so far off the table that it had rarely if ever been mentioned in the Binnenhof. The right-wing fringe, according to its own doctrine, didn’t take climate change seriously, and so to them such measures were completely unnecessary. All the other parties just considered it anathema. So it had never before even been mentioned in the monarch’s Third Tuesday speech.

But today Queen Frederika—reading words written in the wee hours by Ruud—did mention it. At the conclusion of the paragraph about climate change, she said: “There are those who say that efforts to change our ways and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases are too little, too late, and that we must instead turn to geoengineering schemes of various descriptions as a stopgap solution—like the old story of the boy putting his finger in the hole in the dike until help could be summoned. We reject this tempting, but shortsighted and dangerous approach. New geoengineering schemes are to be opposed.” The word “new” had been inserted by Ruud during his last-minute edit session. It was just written on the page in fountain pen. He’d snapped a photo of this, and the following edit, and sent it to his office, which had duly altered the official text of the speech that was at this moment being released on the Internet. The queen read it all correctly. But her cadence changed. She had to slow down, pause, scan the emended page, make sure she was reading Ruud’s handwritten insertion letter-perfect. “It will be pointed out by many who are familiar with our country’s history that we have been pursuing a kind of geoengineering for many hundreds of years—that the Netherlands would not exist, in anything like its current form, without it, and that cessation of those efforts currently underway would lead to the inundation of our country. We specifically exclude existing measures from the policy just stated. Our defense of our shoreline and the lands sheltered behind it remain our chief priority.” And then onward to much more conventional Budget Day talk about the amount of money that needed to be spent this year on those defenses. Then education, pension, public transit, and all the usual stuff. She wound it up, as usual, with a faint, non-denominational invocation of God’s blessing. The crowd in the Ridderzaal stood up on cue and shouted “Lebende Konigin!” followed by “Hoora! Hoora! Hoora!” And then the entire procession reversed itself and took the queen back to her palace.

Not generally a day drinker, Willem poured himself a scotch when he got back to his private office in Noordeinde Palace, and put his feet up. He let video news feed run on the old-school flat-panel television screen bolted to the wall as he scrolled through social media feeds in his glasses and on a tablet and reviewed photos he’d taken during the procession.

Nothing on the television seemed worth turning the sound up for. In the courtyard of the Binnenhof, crews from three different Dutch networks had staked out positions where they could interview members of the States General, or anyone else who seemed newsworthy, with the building as backdrop. By changing the channel you could hop from one such feed to another, each showing a different talking head with basically the same background. This made it seem that each of these persons was standing there alone, when in fact they were part of an assembly-line operation, standing close enough to each other that faint crosstalk could be heard on the audio feeds. Willem found a feed from a streamer who was just aiming their camera down the row, with one MP in the foreground but two others visible farther away. He pinned that on his screen just to keep track of who was speaking, or about to go live, on each of the networks. He had a pretty good idea of the sorts of things they’d be saying. Anyway Remi was at home watching all this and sending wry text messages from time to time, letting Willem know when he should tune in to this or that feed.

Meanwhile, scrolling through his photos, he came across that ZGL banner and decided to figure out what that was about. A few possible candidates popped up on a quick search. As he’d apprehended, some related to Zionism. Fortunately, though, that turned out to be a red herring. The Z stood for Zeelandsche, “Zealandish.” Zeeland was the southwesternmost province of the Netherlands, along the North Sea coast, between the Rhine to the north and the Belgian border to the south. It was flat and low even by Dutch standards, and sparsely populated, basically consisting of a series of finger-like islands reaching out toward the sea. Much of it was reclaimed land. It had been hit hard by the 1953 disaster—it was where Willem’s father had nearly drowned in his attic—and it was now protected from such events, at least in theory, by a long dike with a road running over the top of it, spanning the gaps between the tips of the “fingers.” On maps, this looked impossibly spindly, but when you drove over it you appreciated the mass and solidity of the sand and stones that had been carefully arranged to seal off Zeeland from the ocean.

The G and the L apparently stood for “Geotechnisch Liga” or “Geotechnical” (a synonym for geoengineering?) League. Kind of a weird name in Dutch. “Liga” came from Spanish and was normally used in a football context. But naming oddities aside, ZGL was a real organization apparently. And it had been around for a while. The founder had a brief but plausible-seeming Wikipedia entry stating that he’d been born in 1937 and had founded the organization after the 1953 disaster as a community service group to shore up dikes and aid people in disaster planning. Since then he’d passed away, but the charter of the ZGL was worded in such a way that it would support not just dike-building but any other “geotechnisch” measures that might help protect Zeeland from the ravages of the North Sea. What that added up to, in today’s milieu, was that they were pro-geoengineering and—according to posts and updates from the last week—quite fond of T.R.’s Pina2bo project.

> The twat is up!

said a text from Remi.

Willem turned his attention to the video stream and saw that Martijn Van Dyck was getting into position to be interviewed by one of the networks. He changed the channel on his television until he found the right one.

There were two parties of any real significance that could be called truly far right in the sense of being quite open about their disdain for immigrants as well as espousing certain other positions that were well outside the Overton window of the politics of the day. One of these was older, headed by a senior politician who’d had a long career as a gadfly in Parliament. Then there was the party of Martijn, who was younger, more polished. He presented much the same ideas in a more palatable guise and was considered a man to watch.

The first thing Willem noticed about him was that he was sporting a ZGL button in his lapel. It was adorned with the heraldry of Zeeland: a lion emerging from waves representing the sea.

His surprise over that detail distracted him, at first, from what Martijn was actually saying. Which on any other day wouldn’t have been much of an issue, since his statements were utterly predictable. People mostly watched him for his wit and style. And Willem was tired of Martijn’s wit and style. He drifted back to reading about the ZGL as Martijn started talking. The group’s website included some nice old black-and-white photos of the members in the 1950s repairing dikes, and of the founder giving a speech in front of a Parliamentary committee.

> !!!

came in from Remi and so Willem turned his attention back to Martijn and turned up the volume.

“Yes,” Martijn was insisting to the shocked TV journalist, “our stance on this has in fact changed. We are in the middle of re-drafting the party platform.” He paused, took a deep breath, and showed emotion that even the interviewer knew better than to interrupt. “I lost a friend at Scheveningen the other day,” he announced. “At his funeral, his mother came up to me and implored me to step back and re-examine my party’s position on the klimaat nood.”

Climate emergency. Martijn Van Dyck, until this moment, had never allowed the phrase to pass his lips, and he openly mocked those who used it.

“Recent research has made it undeniable that man-made climate change is real and that it poses the greatest threat to our country since Hitler.”

Willem laughed out loud and slapped his desk. This was like hearing the leader of the Greens come out in favor of clubbing baby seals.

The interviewer couldn’t believe her ears. “That is stunning news,” she said. “Does this mean you’ll be joining up with the Greens?”

Martijn looked quizzical, verging on offended. “The Greens!? Oh, no. We need real solutions to this problem. Effective solutions. Vague promises to cut back on carbon emissions at some point in the distant future are too little, too late. ‘Decarbonization’ is nothing more than a 1940-style capitulation. No, the only way out of this emergency is geoengineering. Such as what we are seeing at the Pina2bo site in Texas. I stand with Her Majesty the Queen in supporting such realistic, hardheaded practical solutions.”

“Fuuuuuck!” Willem shouted.

“The queen?” asked the interviewer.

“Yes. As we just saw from the throne.”

“The queen said the opposite.”

“Ah, in the official text—which she, of course, didn’t write—that’s what it claims. But you have to read between the lines in these things. The way she hesitated—the look on her face as she rattled off those lines that were put in her mouth by the prime minister—there’s no mistaking what it all means.”

“But the words are what they are!” insisted the interviewer, who, to her credit, was having none of it.

“Very well, let’s look at the words then!” Martijn said agreeably. He just happened to have a hard copy of the official text in the breast pocket of his perfectly tailored suit, and it just happened to be folded back to the relevant section. “New geoengineering schemes are to be opposed,” he read, in a singsong voice as if this could all hardly be simpler. “We specifically exclude existing measures from the policy just stated.” He looked up. “There you have it.” He jammed the document back in his pocket as if there’d be no further need of it.

“She’s talking about the dikes. The pumps.”

“She didn’t say dikes and pumps, she said existing as opposed to new. I have seen the videos from Pina2bo. I’d say it exists. Would you disagree?”

The interviewer was dumbstruck.

“The language spoken by our queen clearly supports Pina2bo—a site she has, I believe, personally visited—and my party stands alongside her,” Martijn announced, placing his hand over his heart.

Willem just sat there for a minute with the blood raging in his ears. Texts were pelting in from Remi and others but he wasn’t really seeing them.

He had to focus on the immediate. What did he need to do now?

As little as possible, was the answer. This was Ruud’s problem. Ruud had written the speech. He, not fucking Martijn, was the arbiter of what the words actually meant. Once Ruud got wind of Martijn’s shenanigans he’d be standing in front of one of those cameras stating in no uncertain terms that Pina2bo was not included in the category of “existing” geoengineering schemes and that the speech meant the opposite of what Martijn had just claimed.

But Martijn had announced a very real change in his party’s policy.

Reactions were coming in from all over, on different feeds. Martijn had clearly triumphed in today’s news cycle. The leader of the older far-right party made an announcement that they, too, had altered their position and now stood in favor of the use of geoengineering to address the grave threat posed by rising sea level to the very existence of the Netherlands.

> Snaparound!

This single word in English scrolled up his notifications. It was from Alastair. Willem didn’t know what it signified.

The ZGL website refreshed itself. Superimposed on the pre-existing landing page were fresh headshots of Martijn and Ruud making their announcements. Above and between them was a smaller photo of the queen sitting on the throne earlier today. Willem wondered whether he should go find her and make her aware of all these goings-on. She was taking the rest of the day off from official duties, enjoying what amounted to a family reunion of the House of Orange. Technically this was none of her concern. She was above it. There was no action she could or should take.

For an eccentric local nonprofit dating back to the 1950s, ZGL seemed suspiciously web-savvy. Willem couldn’t shake the vague idea he’d heard of them before.

He hit on the idea of searching through his old emails for any reference to this group. Several hits came back, but they were obviously false positives. The license plate of the pickup truck he had rented in Waco had been ZGL-4737. This had been cited on the rental contract and other paperwork, which had been automatically emailed to him. So any search for “ZGL” in an email just brought up those PDFs. But nothing else. And his email archive went back decades.

If it had not been for the recent weirdness concerning ERDD, he’d have shrugged it off as a coincidence. But he remembered, now, sitting there outside of the RV that Bo’s staff had parked next to the rented pickup truck in Louisiana. Bo had snapped a photo of the ERDD vest hanging up to dry. But he had also—Willem now remembered this—quoted the license plate number of the truck from memory.

He went back and took a closer look at the ZGL website. Some of the pages had creation dates going back to the 1990s, but those could be faked.

Featured on the landing page but now overshadowed by the recent additions—now including a live chat pane auto-scrolling at dizzying speed—was a black-and-white photo of the group’s alleged founder. Willem had previously clicked on this and skimmed it. He rooted it up out of his browsing history and read it again. The bio page was headed up by a larger copy of the same photo, the founder’s name, and his birth and death dates.

The birth date was 4 July 1937. 4/7/37 as everyone outside of America wrote dates.

He compared it against the PDF from the car rental agency. ZGL-4737 had been the truck’s license plate.

He started typing in the URL of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which would show him any old archived versions of the ZGL site. This would, he suspected, provide evidence that the site, though it purported to be decades old, had not existed until a couple of weeks ago.

Then he stopped. Why should he even bother? He already knew what he would find.

He took his glasses off, sat back, closed his eyes, folded his arms, and tried to think.

His phone buzzed a couple of times. Only a few people in the world had the privilege of making his phone buzz. He checked, just to see if it might be Queen Frederika requesting an urgent meeting. But it was his father in Louisiana.

> THANK GOD. FINALLY!

A few texts farther up the screen was Alastair’s enigmatic “Snaparound!”

Willem texted him back.

> Are we still on for tomorrow?

> Yes. As discussed. Unless you have your hands full?

> I’ll meet you at the train station. Safe travels.

The Hague’s train station was within easy walking distance of both palaces. Willem got there in plenty of time to meet Alastair’s train from Amsterdam, so he bought a coffee. Most of the seats in the café were spoken for. At one table, a man in casual attire was reading a newspaper—an actual newspaper consisting of large pieces of paper with ink on them, which blocked his face from view. The front page inevitably featured a color photo of the queen seated on her throne yesterday. Down below was a picture of Martijn Van Dyck over a headline “Climate Bombshell from the Far Right.”

As Willem carried his coffee away from the bar, the man reading the newspaper put one of his shoes up on the edge of a chair and shoved it out into Willem’s path. Then he lowered the paper.

It was Bo.

It took Willem a moment to place him, so out of context, so out of costume. Over his T-shirt he was wearing a garland of fake plastic flowers. Orange, of course. Detritus from yesterday’s parade. Pinned to the shirt was a ZGL button.

Willem sighed. “I only have a few minutes.”

“Nine and a half,” Bo answered, glancing up at a clock on an arrivals screen. “I admire your punctuality, sir. Always ten minutes early.”

“It’s very clever, what you’re doing,” Willem said, taking the seat. “And you do it very well. Someday I’d love to tour the facility.”

“Facility?” Bo asked.

“I imagine a large, new, stylish, high-tech building in Beijing, brilliant hackers showing up every morning to engineer these sites, manipulate the social media feeds, track the metrics—”

“You’re making it out to be much more difficult than it is,” Bo protested. “We don’t need brilliant hackers in flashy buildings. Macedonian teenagers in their parents’ basements are more than sufficient. We use brilliant hackers for other things.”

“Such as . . . running climate models?”

“That would be one example.”

“What are those climate models telling you?”

Bo glanced at the station clock. “Ask Alastair. To judge from that man’s LinkedIn, his models will show very similar results.”

“Why are you fucking with me personally? Why ERDD, ZGL, and all that?”

“Leverage. You have some.”

“With a powerless constitutional monarch. Who had her one yearly moment on the political stage yesterday.”

Bo shrugged. “PMs and governments come and go. Your queen is young and healthy. If she stops crashing planes, she’ll be around for decades. She seems a more stable long-term investment.”

“You can’t invest in her. She is not for sale.”

“I chose my words poorly,” Bo said, with the faintest suggestion of a bow. “Please accept my apologies. I meant to say it was a supportive relationship that we are investing in.”

“How do you imagine that these activities are supportive?”

Bo put the paper down, folded it neatly while he collected his thoughts. “It is a very curious thing about the West. This inability, this unwillingness to talk about realities. Basic facts that are obvious to everyone not in your bubble. Your country is below sea level, for god’s sake!”

“Actually we talk about that all the time, Bo.”

“You have to do something about the fact that sea level is rising!”

“The last time we talked,” Willem said, “you were miffed.”

“Miffed?”

“Offended by the fact that T.R. had not invited you to his party.”

“Oh, I remember,” Bo said. “You said I needed to flirt with him more. To show interest.” He smiled.

Willem was struck by the momentary, horrid thought that Bo’s recent activities around ERDD, ZGL, and all that had been him taking Willem up on his suggestion. That Willem had started that ball rolling with a careless witticism in Louisiana.

But he was pretty sure China didn’t operate on that basis.

“That was right before I went to Pina2bo,” Willem said, “and saw that it was real. Now, you and I both know a lot more.”

“That’s for sure,” Bo said.

“Why are you here today?” Willem asked. “Why bother coming to the Netherlands?”

“Observation. Fact-finding,” Bo said. “Among other things it is an opportunity to see how your country responds to a once-in-a-lifetime storm.”

Willem didn’t catch the reference. “You mean what happened at Scheveningen?”

Bo seemed nonplussed. “No, I’m talking about the one in three weeks.”

“We can’t forecast three weeks out!”

“We can.” Bo’s gaze strayed down to Willem’s feet. “Nice cowboy boots.”

Alastair said exactly the same words a few minutes later when he stepped off the train from Amsterdam.

“I debated whether to wear them today.”

Alastair blinked. “Because it might be noticed and read as an implicit show of support for T.R.?”

Willem nodded, falling into step beside Alastair. “Then I saw it was forecast to rain later, and I said, to hell with it, I’m wearing the boots.”

The two men weaved around each other as they turned into the heavy flow of pedestrian traffic along the station’s central artery. “Listen,” Willem said, “can you—by which I mean, anyone—forecast a major storm three weeks in the future?”

A message buzzed in from his contact in Dutch intelligence: a response from an urgent query he’d fired off minutes earlier, just after parting ways with Bo. It stated that, according to immigration records, Bo had entered the country a week ago.

“Make that four weeks,” he added.

“You’re speaking of a hypothetical storm three weeks from today? Or four weeks?”

“Three weeks from today.”

“Well, there’s going to be an exceptionally high tide then, I can tell you that much.”

“You just happen to know that!?”

“Consider what I do for a living—when I’m not doing weird projects for the Queen of the Netherlands, that is,” Alastair said. “An exceptionally high tide makes it more likely that the Thames Barrier will be raised to protect London. This impedes shipping.”

“It makes sense,” Willem allowed. “Still, I’m impressed you just know the tide tables three weeks out.”

“I’m just fucking with you,” Alastair admitted. “My family have a cottage on Skye. I’m going there in three weeks, for a last visit before winter closes in. Was checking the ferry timetables yesterday. It’s got high tide warnings posted for those dates.”

“Well played,” Willem said. “Coffee?” For they were near the café where the strange conversation with Bo had happened just a few minutes ago. Bo was gone. An older woman had seized his newspaper and opened it to a lavish photo spread showing the hats and frocks that had been on display yesterday at the Ridderzaal.

“No, thank you,” Alastair said. “Anyway, storms are obviously more difficult to predict than tides. Oh, we know what such a storm would look like. It would look like 1953. A low pressure system of unusual intensity forming up near Iceland and coming down the chute between Scotland and Norway, pushing a surge ahead of it. Lots of rain just adds gasoline to the fire, if I can mix my metaphors.”

“How far in advance could you predict the formation of that low pressure system?”

“Ten days? A couple of weeks?”

“Not three weeks? Four?”

“There might be some really cutting-edge models that would run that far out. With big error bars though.”

Willem nodded. They exited the station and came out into a continuation of yesterday’s hot weather. Scattered clouds hinted at a change later. Willem led Alastair around some construction barricades and got them pointed toward Noordeinde.

“I thought I was here to predict climate, though. Not weather. For weather you want a different sort of chap.” He was just being playful.

“I got a hot tip that there would be a once-in-a-lifetime storm in three weeks,” Willem explained, “and I’m trying to figure out whether it should be taken seriously.”

“Does the tipster have connections to well-funded boffins with very advanced computational modeling capabilities?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’re fucked. Keep an eye on the North Atlantic!” Alastair said. “I’ll do likewise, now that you’ve aroused my curiosity. Perhaps my trip to Skye shall have to be postponed.”

“Oh, I’ve got another question,” Willem said. “What did you mean by snaparound?”

“Sorry to be enigmatic. It’s a thing Greens have been fretting about for years. They have always harbored a suspicion that one day their opponents—oil companies, basically—would suddenly reverse their position on climate change.”

“As Martijn Van Dyck did yesterday.”

“Yes. But then, instead of falling in line with what the Greens want, those people would say, ‘Och, too late, the damage has been done, water under the bridge, the only answer is geoengineering.’”

“So from the Green point of view,” Willem said, “they—the Greens—are steadfastly holding to the position they’ve held all along. But their opponents have snapped way around from one extreme to another.”

Alastair nodded. “I got excited and sent you that text because, as I mentioned, Greens have been worrying about this forever. A lot of their political strategy in the climate debate is predicated on fear of snaparound. But this was the first time in all these years I’d ever watched it happen in real time!”

“Do you expect there’ll be more of it?”

“I expect,” Alastair said, “that T.R. has many observant friends in boardrooms up and down the length of Houston’s Energy Corridor.” He slowed for a moment and took an appraising look at Noordeinde Palace. “Including . . .”

“Royal Dutch Shell,” Willem said.

The queen brought her daughter to the meeting. By the letter of the law, Princess Charlotte ought to be in school. But she’d reached an age when classes were less regimented, and independent study was encouraged. As long as the princess wasn’t falling behind in her schoolwork, she was allowed a certain number of absences. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to invite her to the weekly one-on-one with the prime minister, for example. But on occasions when there was legitimate educational value, and especially when it might help prepare Charlotte for her future duties as sovereign, she was allowed to skip school and sit in. Quietly.

Many of the old grand rooms in Noordeinde had too much historical value to be kitted out with modern office gear, but one room had been brought reasonably up to the standards prevailing in the early twenty-first century and so Alastair plugged his gear into that. Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

Willem decided to make some practical use of the resultant delay. “Now that we have finally gotten past Budget Day and all that,” he said, “I have been taking a look at your schedule for the next few weeks.”

“And what do you think?” the queen asked.

“Well, it’s a bit sparse. Just because we’ve been too distracted to pack in a lot of events. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Alastair did remark that there is an unusually high tide coming up three weeks from now. Could cause problems if it happened to coincide with bad weather. If you aren’t averse to adding some new items to your schedule, then I’d suggest we emphasize disaster preparedness.”

She smiled. “No one can ever criticize the queen for taking a bold stance in favor of disaster preparedness.”

Charlotte produced an eye roll. The target, however, was not her mother. “They will criticize you for anything. You should see—”

Frederika gave her daughter an appraising look. “Been reading the comments, have we?”

Charlotte looked as if she’d been caught red-handed in the liquor cabinet.

“We’ve talked about this,” Frederika said.

“I know. Reading the Internet will drive me crazy.”

“People will make fun of me for being a predictable Goody Two-Shoes if I advocate for disaster preparedness,” the queen agreed. “But it is a natural segue from the Scheveningen disaster. And it will flush Texas and Pina2bo and Martijn Van Dyck out of the news cycle.” She turned her gaze toward Willem as she said this and gave him a nod.

“Very well, I’ll begin looking for such opportunities,” Willem said. “Given the usual lag, it might take a couple of weeks before this gets into full swing.”

Suddenly the AV system sprang to life and the coat of arms of the House of Orange appeared on the royal flat-screen. Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia’s breeding took over as she found a way to compliment the technician on his brilliance without making him look bad for not having had the thing ready in the first place.

Three-dimensional augmented-reality globes might actually have been useful in this case, but the software Alastair had been using was no-nonsense academic research code that liked to plot simple flat rectangular maps. So that was what they were going to be looking at. He’d made hard copies too, which he distributed to Willem and the queen. He hadn’t known Princess Charlotte was coming, so she had to share her mother’s copy.

“I’ll get right to it,” he said. “If Pina2bo continues to operate as planned, it’s good for the Netherlands. That is the most salient information I can give you during this meeting.”

The queen, who’d been leafing through the handout, crossed her arms and looked at him. Lotte looked like she’d been biting her tongue. She drew the handout toward herself and perused it as Alastair went on:

“Many of the negative effects and heightened risks that climate change has inflicted on your country—and mine, as it happens—in recent decades will tend to be reversed. In some cases the speed of that reversal will be dramatic. Temperatures will drop noticeably. The amount of evaporation from the ocean’s surface will be reduced and so we won’t see as much torrential rainfall. Ice caps will stop melting. This reduces the possibility of a sudden change in the North Atlantic Current, which truly would be a catastrophe for all of Europe.”

“That’s the thing that would make us like Siberia if it happened?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes, Your Royal Highness.” In Texas Alastair had gradually lapsed into the habit of addressing “Saskia” informally. But a couple of weeks’ re-immersion in Britain, combined with the grandeur of Noordeinde Palace, had put him back on his best behavior. “It would give us the climate we, in a sense, deserve for living so far north. Not the much more moderate one that we have enjoyed for all of recorded history. You appear to be familiar with the concept already, so I won’t—”

“Mansplain it?” the queen put in.

“Yes, but since the princess brought the topic up: it is hard to overstate what a nightmare that would be for all Europe. The melting of Greenland makes it more likely, Pina2bo makes it less so. Anyway—setting all that aside—page 4 shows predicted effects on polar ice. Because the melting of the ice caps would be slowed, sea level rise would eventually stop.”

“And weather would get colder?”

“Yes. Not in the devastating way that the princess just alluded to, but it would get your country back toward—” He held up his hands. “I guess you could call it Hans Brinker conditions.”

The queen enjoyed the joke. “We can look forward to skating on the canals again.”

“Yes. Your farmers would have to adapt in small ways—shifting toward different varieties of seeds, changing their planting schedules. But it’s either that or end up under ten feet of salt water.”

“Now, this all disregards the fact that there would still be far too much CO₂ in the atmosphere,” the queen pointed out.

“Indeed, Your Majesty. And as we discussed in Texas, the upper layers of the ocean absorb that from the air and become more acidic. It has devastating effects on coral reefs. But if I may be altogether cold-blooded for a moment—” Alastair let it hang there.

“The Netherlands doesn’t have coral reefs,” Willem said, so that no one else would have to.

The princess was visibly distressed.

“It is a thing we must say out loud,” said Willem, “because others—like Martijn Van Dyck—are going to be saying it in front of cameras and microphones. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about coral reefs. But the queen must be ready to hear from those of her citizens who will take such stances.”

“There are other techniques that might be used to address the problem of ocean acidification,” Alastair said. “They are outside of my remit for this job.”

“Some will say,” Willem added, “it’s just more geoengineering to fix a problem left over from the first round of geoengineering.”

“Alastair, hold on a moment,” the queen said. “All these changes you’re talking about—am I to understand that T.R. is creating all these global effects single-handedly just by operating Pina2bo?”

Alastair nodded. “That is the incredible leverage of SO₂ in the stratosphere. It’s why people like T.R. are drawn to it.”

Saskia just blinked and shook her head.

“At its rated capacity, Pina2bo is at the lower end of the size needed to effect these changes. If there were two or three or four Pina2bos all going at once, then the changes described in my report would take place rapidly. Dramatically.”

“You mean, if he builds more guns at the Flying S Ranch? Or fires the one he has more frequently?” the queen asked. “Or . . . you’re perhaps talking about other such facilities in other parts of the world?”

“Now you ask an interesting question, mevrouw. In a way, it is the question. What happens in these models when we break things out regionally? Both as to cause and effect? Cause meaning: What if T.R. had built the gun in Alberta or Ecuador instead of West Texas? Effect meaning: How will different parts of the world be affected by Pina2bo?”

“I’ll bet the answer is complicated,” the queen said.

“If all you care about is the Netherlands, no. It’s absolutely a win for the Netherlands. Another country it’s good for is China. A clear, unambiguous win for China on multiple levels.”

Willem felt his face getting warm.

“What’s an example of a country it’s bad for?” Charlotte asked in a small voice.

“Possibly India,” Alastair said without hesitation. “Oh, their neighbors in Bangladesh will love it. It’s going to save that country. And those parts of eastern India that have similar problems to Bangladesh will also enjoy a net benefit. Western and southern India may see . . . how shall I put this . . . alteration in the monsoons.”

“Oh, my god!” Saskia exclaimed and splayed one hand out on her chest.

Alastair paused for a few moments to let the queen process this. They had all understood, from the very beginning of the conversation with T.R., that solar geoengineering was “controversial” and might have “side effects requiring further study” but that verbiage was the stuff of PowerPoint decks in Brussels. Narrowing the impact to one specific region suddenly made it very concrete and perhaps caused the queen to envision what kind of fallout—perhaps literal fallout—could result from the Netherlands openly backing any one such scheme.

The princess seemed to be more taken aback by her mother’s reaction than by what Alastair had said, but she was already googling “monsoon” and so she’d understand the significance soon enough.

When Saskia met his eye again, Alastair continued: “I’m not saying that the monsoon would stop. It never stopped in the 1990s after the Pinatubo eruption. It is a dizzyingly complicated interaction having to do with where the sun is in the sky, the topography of the Himalayas, the albedo of the land, jet streams, Coriolis effect, ocean currents, and so on. El Niño even enters into it. Lately, it has been drier than the historical norm, even while the rest of the planet has been much wetter. When the monsoon rains are heavy, they cause regional flooding that can lead to more death and destruction than a dry spell. So this is not a simple matter.”

The queen had pulled the handout from Charlotte’s grasp and begun nervously shuffling through it. “Page 23 is probably what you’re looking for,” Alastair said, putting the graphic up on the room’s big screen. It was a flat rectangular map of the world, with continents and countries outlined in black. Covering that was an overlay of color ranging from blue to red. Much of the world was tinted by a wash of pastel pink or baby blue, indicating relatively small predicted change in annual rainfall, but there were localized areas of more saturated color. Many of these were in places like the Sahara, the Himalayas, or Greenland that were relatively unpopulated. The Indian subcontinent, taken as a whole, didn’t look terrible. But there was a worrisome red blotch in the northwest, between the Himalayas to the east and Pakistan to the west. “The Punjab,” Alastair said, highlighting it with a red laser pointer. “The Breadbasket. Generally the last place the monsoon reaches as it spreads up from Sri Lanka in the late spring and early summer. And the first place from which it recedes, a few months later.”

“So, more vulnerable to changes in the monsoon than other areas,” said Willem, filling in the blanks.

“Yes. And it borders on some areas that are geopolitically complicated.” In this company Alastair didn’t need to go into much detail about India’s endless border disputes with Pakistan and with China, or to belabor the fact that all three of those countries were nuclear powers.

The queen looked for a few moments at Charlotte, perhaps having second thoughts about having invited her. Oblivious, the princess was spawning Punjab-related browser tabs and slamming away at “subscribe” buttons.

“What can you say about the actual probability of drought or famine? The possible toll?” Saskia asked.

“Very little really,” Alastair said. “But what I can say with some confidence is that maps similar to this one are probably being looked at by people in Delhi right now. As well as Beijing and other places.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Willem said. “I’m sorry to be so cynical, but once people have seen a map like this one, the scientific, on-the-ground reality no longer actually matters.”

Saskia nodded. “We discussed this on the train. It’s about how everything is perceived.”

“Yes. People already believed that the weather was being manipulated even when it wasn’t. Now that T.R. actually is doing something, any perceived change whatsoever will be credited to, or blamed on, him.”

“Or anyone seen as supporting him,” Saskia added, nodding. She nudged Lotte. No point in inviting her to these things if she wasn’t going to learn anything. “How about it, darling? Now that you are an instant expert on the Punjab, what’s the mood there? Are people furious at T.R. McHooligan?”

“A few of them,” Lotte said, “but no, mostly they are too excited about Big Fish to pay any attention to geoengineering.”

“Who or what is that?”

By way of an answer, Lotte clicked on a browser tab and rotated the screen toward her. Bracketed between luridly colored headlines in what Saskia assumed to be Punjabi script was a photo of a magnificently ripped young man posing on a peak of some impossibly high mountain brandishing a stick. “Behold,” Lotte said.

Saskia gave him a good long look. The picture seemed to have been taken someplace cold. Atop Big Fish’s massive pecs, brown nipples jutted out like Himalayan pinnacles.

“What does he do other than look like that?”

“Beats the hell out of Chinese bastards with a stick.”

Despite being a reasonably mature woman with serious responsibilities, Saskia found it difficult to get her mind back on track, and the way Lotte was speed-scanning through Big Fish Pinterest boards didn’t help. What had they been talking about a minute ago? How it was all perceived.

“We didn’t hire Alastair to set official government policy,” Willem said. “That’s Ruud’s problem. The only thing we need to concern ourselves with is what if any stance the royal house needs to adopt about these matters.”

He lapsed into Dutch at some point during all that. Alastair tuned out. But his body language said he had something to add: “Earlier I mentioned that there was a cause side as well as an effect side, when it comes to how these things are situated around the planet. There are plenty of studies showing that where a volcano erupts—or a geoengineering project is sited—has a very significant impact on how these effects play out around the world. It has been known for a while, for example, that volcanic eruptions in the Southern Hemisphere lead to wetter monsoons, whereas Northern Hemisphere volcanoes produce the opposite effect.”

“So if T.R. had put the gun in Argentina . . .” Willem said.

“The consequences for China and India might very well be the other way round,” Alastair confirmed.

Saskia had been following this even more keenly than usual. “How about—” she began, then stopped herself and met Lotte’s eye.

“I know what that look means!” Lotte said and stood up. Willem and Alastair, still on their best behavior, stood up also.

“The lesson in climate geopolitics has been, I should say, even more informative than expected!” Saskia said. “Go back to your room, young lady, and pursue your studies of Big Fish.”

“Oh, I very much intend to, Mother. By the time you see me next—”

“That will do.” She gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. Willem and Alastair were too embarrassed to bid Lotte goodbye. The princess left the room.

“You’ll remember our Venetian friends,” Saskia began.

Willem and Alastair were both a little taken aback at this unexpected turn. For Willem’s part, he had never expected to see or to hear from the Venetians again. They’d been a fascinating historical curiosity, nothing more.

“I think I’m going to sit down!” Alastair joked, and did. So did Willem.

“I have remained in occasional contact with Cornelia since Texas,” Saskia said. “Just friendly text messages back and forth, that sort of thing. She’s been on vacation the whole time. Or so I assumed—until recently—based on the selfies she was sending me. Is there a way I can put pictures from my phone on the screen?”

It turned out that there was. And for once, it actually turned out to be simple enough that between the three of them they were able to sort it out without having to bring in a Ph.D.

Cornelia was almost unrecognizable in the first because she was in casual touristy garb very different from the kind of elegant look they’d come to expect from her on the train. A big straw hat, large sunglasses, a white sun shirt over a tank top. She was on a boat. They could see very little of this, just enough to surmise that it was a yacht. In the background was an island in a blue sea, and in the greater distance, muddled by haze, was a much bigger landform, presumably the mainland. Both were mountainous and rocky. One might think the Aegean, except that the forest was denser and darker than the islands of Greece and Turkey. “Black Sea?” Alastair guessed. Willem thought Corsica.

Saskia advanced through several more photos. Some were selfies, but Cornelia wasn’t in all of them. They told a little story. The yacht docked at a pier on the island. Not a very nice-looking pier. It looked industrial/military, abandoned and dangerously tumbledown, with new caution tape surrounding old cave-ins on the pier’s surface that were large enough to swallow cars. There were stern-looking signs in block letters, written in the Roman alphabet, but not in a language any of them could identify. Fragments of both Greek and Cyrillic could also be seen.

“I give up!” Alastair admitted.

“How about you, Willem?” Saskia asked.

“Former Yugoslavia? Macedonia?”

“Albania!” Saskia announced triumphantly and gave Willem a mock-stern look as if to say What am I paying you for if you can’t recognize Albania!? She swiped through a couple of snapshots depicting a miserable port facility. “Right across the Adriatic from the heel of the boot of Italy.”

“It looks like shit,” Alastair said. “Not Cornelia’s kind of place at all.”

“Oh, but it is!” Saskia said. She’d come to a picture of a ruined stone building, very ancient, but vaguely recognizable as a church.

Willem had been speed-googling. “Albania only has two islands,” he said. “Both of which used to be part of—”

But Saskia had beaten him to the punch line with a zoomed-in snapshot of the collapsed front of the church. Barely discernible, carved into a heavily timeworn stone lintel, was a winged lion. “The Venetian Empire!” she proclaimed. “Not since about 1800, of course. The Austrians gobbled it up, then lost it. Later it fell under Soviet control.”

“But as we’ve seen, Cornelia’s crowd have long memories,” Alastair said drily.

“They seem quite good at maintaining these connections, down through the years,” Saskia agreed.

“If this is the island I’m reading about,” said Willem, scrolling on his tablet, “the Soviets built a chemical weapons plant there during the Cold War.”

“That would explain so much,” Alastair remarked. For, aside from the ruined church, all the other pictures were fully consistent with the decorative theme of “abandoned Warsaw Pact nerve gas complex and toxic waste dump on godforsaken island.”

“One doesn’t hear much out of Albania,” Willem said.

“They’ve been active the last couple of decades, seeking foreign investment, trying to boot up a tech sector and all that,” Alastair said. “Every so often they’ll pop up in the City with a stock offering or a real estate scheme.”

“Well, it would appear that Cornelia and her friends have risen to the bait,” Saskia said. She was swiping slowly through a series of photos depicting a Land Rover journey up a switchbacked mountain road.

“That scans,” Alastair said. “London and Wall Street are skittish about the Balkans because they don’t understand the place. See it as unstable. With this unfathomable history. But if you’re a Venetian aristocrat, it’s . . . like Ireland is to England.”

The road led to a summit where there was, at last, some new activity: construction trailers, a helipad, storage containers. All surrounding a flat area, in the middle of which was a drilling rig and a stockpile of drill rods.

“They’re sinking an exploratory shaft,” Alastair guessed. “The first step toward a bigger one.”

Saskia looked at him. “Perhaps you could have a chat later with Willem about extending your contract.”

“Oh,” Alastair said, “it would kill me to walk away from this now.”

Saskia flipped through the handout. “It would be illuminating to know how these maps and charts would all look if, in a year or two, a clone of Pina2bo were to go into operation off the coast of Albania.” She looked up. “I believe that Cornelia has made up her mind to save her city from the sea. And heaven help anyone who gets in her way.”