Termination Shock

The Mississippi Delta

Willem was supposed to rendezvous with the others near Houston. He could have done this directly by getting on Interstate 10 and driving due west for three hundred and fifty miles. But now that he was so close he couldn’t not go into New Orleans. It had been his first big city. Chicago had always been too far from their suburban home, so enormous and brutal and forbidding. But on the family’s vacation trips to Louisiana, teenaged Willem, bored out of his mind, had learned how to take public transit into New Orleans, how to find the French Quarter, and, in particular, how to find the gay part of it, which was ancient and well-established. On the whole his experiences there had been pretty tame, but later, when he had ventured into the night life of Amsterdam, he had been able to do so sure-footedly.

Later in life, he’d got to know people there. Very different people: ones he’d met at conferences where inhabitants of low-lying places came together to obsess about sea level. They’d be surprised if a personal representative of the Queen of the Netherlands just turned up without any advance notice. But he had a perfect alibi: he had gone to check in on his father. So before pulling out of the driveway he sent a message to Hugh St. Vincent, a department head at Tulane, announcing his presence in the area, apologizing for the late notice, and asking if there was anything new worth seeing. Hugh would understand that Willem was not asking for recommendations on where to eat beignets or listen to jazz.

Then Willem pointed his truck toward New Orleans. He passed up an opportunity to jump on an interstate, preferring an old two-laner. The landscape was flat by American standards, but not by Dutch. The usual American roadside scene of convenience stores, mobile home parks, and equipment depots interspersed with wooded areas. On the map it looked like a sponge, with water coming practically up to the road, but if you didn’t know that, it would just look like normal dry land, exuberantly green, with a lot of trees. His practiced eye noted that the bed of the road was elevated a couple of feet above the surrounding earth.

A few miles short of New Orleans, he came to the Bonnet Carré Spillway, which was not much to look at but was probably at the top of the list of must-see attractions for the climate change tourist. Here all the roads and railways had been funneled into the five-mile-thick isthmus separating the Mississippi’s left bank from Lake Pontchartrain. Running athwart all that was a mile-wide sluice connecting the two. Or rather it was capable of doing so when it was opened. A hundred years ago they’d constructed a spillway barring its Mississippi end. This was a palisade consisting of seven thousand massive vertical timbers arranged vertically in a frame of concrete and steel, deeply anchored in the river’s bank. To one side, these were scoured by the flow of the Mississippi. To the other side was what passed for dry land: a wetland stretching from there to the lake, striped with drainage ditches and speckled with puddles and ponds, passing beneath elevated highways and railroads.

The summed pressure of the Mississippi water on the vast palisade must have been huge, but the pressure on any one single timber—they were about the size of railroad ties—was modest enough that it could be pulled up to create a slit that would let some water through. Rail-mounted cranes moved along the top of the frame pulling the timbers up or pushing them down to regulate the volume of flow diverted from the river into the sluice and thence to Lake Pontchartrain, which had its own outlet to the Gulf of Mexico.

They’d built all this after the terrible flood of 1927, which had inspired the blues song “When the Levee Breaks.” It was intended as a safety valve, a bypass to be opened at rare moments of dire need, when heavy rains falling upstream—which was to say anywhere between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies—had swollen the river to the point where it was threatening to overtop or burst through the levees and inundate New Orleans. Several times in the ensuing ninety years it had been used just as planned. But then in 2019 they’d been forced to leave it wide open for four months because of a wet winter. Other years since had not been quite as bad as that, but 2019 had inaugurated a new pattern, which was that the spillway was partially open more often than not.

For all its immensity, you could drive right over the Bonnet Carré Spillway and not take note of it. You’d see the water under the causeway, of course. But around here there was a lot of water.

The Mississippi was about seven Rhines. When this spillway was wide open, it diverted two and a half Rhines into the lake.

Now, where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal. A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder. It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.

Willem pulled off the highway onto an access road leading to the spillway, just so he could check his messages and spend a few minutes watching the cranes gliding along pulling the wooden timbers up. It had been a wet year to begin with. Now, rains in the hurricane’s wake had sent huge flows coursing down the Mississippi and so they were opening the spillway full bore. He got a few curious looks from the workers, but once again the white pickup served as industrial camouflage.

Hugh was on vacation in some cooler and drier clime, but he referred Willem to Dr. Margaret Parker, a colleague in the same department at Tulane, who agreed to have coffee with him. Ten years ago they would simply have met on the campus, but her lab had been downsized in the pandemic and never re-upsized, and she worked out of her home. It was just as convenient for her to meet him at a café in the French Quarter. She knew of a place with a second-story, open-air gallery that looked out toward the river.

The Bonnet Carré Spillway, which he now put in his rearview mirror, was the upstream bulwark of The Wall, aka HSDRRS (Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System): a system of flood defenses, largely invisible to the non-expert observer, that encircled greater New Orleans. Dutch experts had been brought in to consult, and this was how Willem had come into occasional contact with people like Hugh and Margaret.

Once he had pierced The Wall at Bonne Carré, he saw no more of it as he drove twenty miles down the road—which eventually became Tulane Street—into the center of the city. Most of what he saw out the truck’s windows just looked like any other place in Outskirts, USA. After a while, though, the buildings got bigger and less commercial. He drove through the downtown campus of Tulane University. It gave way to that part of New Orleans that answered to the purposes of all big-city downtowns: high-rise hotels, convention center, stadium, casino, and a cruise ship port along the river. Willem passed through it as quickly as he could and got an impression of many tents and RVs, cars that looked inhabited, plenty of private security at doors of buildings and entrances to parking structures.

But then he was in the old part of town. The truck got him to within a block of the café, then politely suggested he get out and walk. He opened the door and stepped down to a three-hundred-year-old cobblestone street. The truck drove away as fast as it could, which around here was little better than walking pace. It would park if it found a space, or circle the block otherwise.

Margaret had sent him a token that tagged him as having a reservation, so a hostess swung the door open for him as he drew near, plucked a menu from a stack, and led him up a rickety ancient stair and down a narrow hall to the open gallery above. This had probably looked out over the Mississippi when it had been constructed. Willem guessed it was over two hundred years old, maybe pre-Revolutionary. Nowadays the picture had been complicated by other buildings, waterfront facilities, and constructs forming aspects of The Wall. Even so, once Willem had taken the proffered seat beneath a large umbrella, he was able to see brown water sliding slowly by, sparkling in the afternoon sun. For better and worse, he could now smell the French Quarter on a warm summer’s afternoon in the wake of a hurricane. It took him a full minute just to take in the olfactory mise-en-scène. More than anything he’d seen or heard, this took him back, made him a sixteen-year-old boy again, loitering self-consciously outside the entrance to a gay bar, wondering what would happen if he stepped over its threshold. So Margaret found him with tears in his eyes. She gave him a moment.

They sat there on the gallery and chatted for about half an hour. It wasn’t a life-changing conversation for either of them, just a pleasant enough diversion. Willem dutifully told his cover story: going to check on Dad in the wake of the near miss by the hurricane, wanted to see the sights relevant to climate change. Margaret brought him up to speed. “We have something y’all don’t,” she said, where “we” meant the Mississippi Delta and “y’all” meant the Netherlands. “The river is an unstoppable land-building machine, if we just let it do its work. We can’t switch it off, just point it in different directions. When y’all want to build land, y’all have to lug the sand to where it’s needed, and lay it down. Pros and cons: you get nothing for free—”

“But we get it exactly where we want it,” Willem said.

“With us, it’s like—have you ever seen what happens when a firefighter loses his grip on a fire hose?”

“No,” Willem said, “but I can imagine.”

“It’s a chaotic behavior. The hose can’t be shut off. It thrashes around like an angry snake. That’s the Mississippi downstream of New Orleans. For a long time we just tried to keep it channeled between levees. We had to keep building those higher. You’ll see. It couldn’t break out, so its outlet stretched farther and farther into the Gulf as it kept laying down sediment. Meanwhile the Gulf went on rising, sneaking around to attack the Delta on its flanks. Created a huge system of saltwater marshes and a whole economy to go with it—oysters, shrimp, saltwater fish. But something had to change. So we created the two big diversions. That’s what you’ll want to see. Here, I brought you a present.”

Margaret reached into her bag, favoring Willem with a mysterious smile, and pulled out a wad of bright fabric. She shook it out and held it up to reveal a reflective fluorescent green safety vest of the type worn by road crews. “Don’t worry, it’s been washed.” She gave it a toss. It wafted across the table and he snatched it out of the air.

“Who or what is ERDD?” he asked, reading letters stenciled across the back.

“Ecological Restoration of Delta Distributaries,” she said. “The name of a crowdfunded project I worked on for a while. Now defunct. Doesn’t matter. South of here, no one can read.” (This was dry humor.) “You wear one of these, you can walk just about anywhere down where you’re going and people will think you’re doing something official.”

“And I have the vehicle to go with it,” Willem said. “A generic white pickup.”

“Oh, you can get in anywhere with that and a reflective vest!”

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome. So. What you want to see is the two big diversions. We blew holes in the levee. One on the left bank at Wills Point, just about thirty miles down from here, the other in the right bank another, oh, five miles farther along. Fresh water’s pouring through, dumping silt where it hits the Gulf, and the silt’s making new land—taking back some of what the Gulf stole from us. But the water isn’t clean—remember where it all came from.” Here Margaret swept her arm around in an arc directed generally northward, as if to encompass the whole watershed of the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio system, all the way to Canada. “And because it’s fresh, it kills the saltwater ecosystem. All those homeless people you saw on your way in? Many of them were working oystermen ten years ago.”

Willem glanced toward the adjoining high-rise district, sprouting from a low clutter of RVs and tents. “You’re right,” he said, “that is not a choice we have to make. Oh, fisheries are always problematic in all countries. But when we build coastal defenses, as a rule, we are creating jobs. Not obliterating valuable sources of employment.”

“How’s that going, anyway?” she asked. “How much higher can you pile those things?” She was just being folksy, of course. She had a Ph.D. in this stuff. Willem smiled, to let her know he got the joke.

“As high as we want,” he answered. “But it’s not the average sea level that keeps us up at night. It’s the storm surge that overtops a dike somewhere, blows a hole in the perimeter, lets the Atlantic through faster than we can pump it out.”

She nodded. “Nineteen fifty-three.” Then: “What’s funny?”

“Not two hours ago, my father was lecturing me about 1953. You, he, and I are probably the only three people in Louisiana who understand the reference.”

“He lived through it?”

“He keeps an axe in his attic.”

“Everyone does,” Margaret said.

Willem drove south, cutting off a long eastward hairpin of the Mississippi and rejoining it several miles south of the city. According to the map, the road ran along the river. But even though it was only a few meters distant, he could not see it, but only an earthen levee that ramped up from the road’s sodden, puddle-strewn shoulder to two or three times a man’s height.

At one point he noticed the superstructure of an oil tanker high above him. Because of the way the highway curved, it looked like this enormous vessel was coming down the road in the oncoming lane. As a Dutchman he prided himself on taking such prodigies in stride; why, at home there were places where canals crossed over roads on bridges consisting of water-filled concrete troughs, and you could drive under ships gliding over the top of you. But even so he could not resist going into tourist mode for a moment. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out, immediately regretting it as his feet came down in a puddle. Not rain, but Mississippi River water that had been forced through the saturated earth of the levee by the same hydrostatic pressure that was keeping that oil tanker suspended above his head.

The ground got drier as he scrambled up the levee and came out onto its crest, currently no more than half a meter above the river’s surface. He could now look across the full breadth of the river, at least a kilometer. The tanker blocked much of that view. It was churning upstream, headed for some refinery complex in the interior.

All this was happening in a linear, stretched-out town that ran continuously along the bank. It waxed and waned, but it never really became open country; it was sparsely inhabited by people who thought nothing of a passing oil tanker but found it very odd that a stranger would pull over to the side of the road to hike up the levee and sightsee.

Back in his truck, he drove on and reached the diversion a few minutes later. The riverside highway vaulted over it on a new bridge. Instead of crossing it, he pulled off onto a road that ran parallel to the diversion’s bank. For the first ten or so miles, this snaked through mature woods and small towns. To judge from the aureolas of rust surrounding the bullet holes in the road signs, it had been inhabited for a while. Then old pavement gave way to new, and new gave way to gravel, and signs discouraged casual motorists from going any farther.

The diversion—an artificial construct, only a few years old—was an alternate route for the water of the Mississippi to reach the Gulf. It was aimed toward parts of Plaquemines Parish that were still shown as dry land on old maps, but that had long since ceased to exist and been stricken from cartographical databases. Hydrological engineers had sculpted the diversion so that it would carry as much silt as possible out to its very end, then dump it in shallows that had been brackish or salt water until this thing had suddenly inundated them with fresh. The cost of it was that the species that had been living there all died. The benefit was new land. Balancing that cost and that benefit was a judgment Willem was glad he had no part in making.

He parked in a big open gravel lot at the end of the road. Again his vehicle blended well with what was here, though most of these pickup trucks were older and more beat-up than his rental. Lined up along one edge of the lot were a dozen or so buses. Their paint jobs told the story that they’d been part of Louisiana’s tourism industry until ten years ago, and little maintained since, now pressed into service as worker transportation. Opposite them was a row of portable toilets. Canopies had been staked down to shade rows of plastic tables where pump bottles of hand sanitizer and rolls of paper towels stood sentry. Right now apparently it was the middle of a shift and few workers were in evidence. Four bus drivers had gathered at one table to vape and play dominoes. Service workers wiped tables and sprayed insecticide.

Margaret had told him where to go, what to look for, how to explain himself. He put on his reflective vest and his earthsuit helmet, deploying its sun shade and turning up the A/C just to the point where he could feel cool dry air on his face. He slung a water bag over his shoulder and set off in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico’s indistinct shore. Past the parking lot, the road dwindled and dissolved. ATVs supplanted pickup trucks as he went along. Airboats gradually replaced the ATVs, and skiffs took over from there. Trees peeled away to reveal the Gulf. He was sloshing, his Walmart shoes long since ruined. Barges were moored here and there, along what might become a shore at low tide. They were laden with plants: some just little sprouts you could pick up in your hand, others whole trees, or at least saplings. The workers were stooping in knee-deep water to plant these. These species had been chosen because they were good at filtering silt from the flow and making it come to rest and form, if not dry land, then at least a stubborn muck that might be dry land one day when the trees had put down roots and made a bulwark against storms and waves.

When he finally got back to the parking lot an hour later, Willem found tea waiting for him, courtesy of the People’s Republic of China.

He’d half expected something like this; he just hadn’t known when or where. The Chinese had showed up today in a rented RV, which they had parked next to his truck. They had deployed the awning bracketed to the RV’s side, creating a patch of shade between the two vehicles. A folding camp table and two chairs completed the basic setup. The inevitable middle-aged Chinese functionary was seated in one of them perusing a tablet, occasionally raising it to snap pictures. He had taken the radical measure of removing his suit jacket and loosening his necktie, but drawn the line at undoing his French cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. He stood up theatrically as Willem approached and greeted him in Mandarin while making a semblance of a bow—much better than shaking hands from an epidemiology standpoint. He gestured to the available chair and summoned his assistants, who were in the RV. To judge from the purring noises emanating from its various systems, this was running on generator power and it was air-conditioned. A guy like this would always have aides; god forbid he should ever be seen carrying an object. Tea was produced and served. It was all done according to the procedures and etiquette that had surrounded such things in China since time immemorial and that Willem knew perfectly well.

“Bo,” the man said, and went on in English: “Believe it or not, that is actually my family name. When I first came to the West, they told me I should pick an Anglo name to go by. Tom or Dick or Harry, you know.” He shrugged expressively, playing it for laughs. “I was thinking Bob? But then I got assigned to the South. People are actually called Bo here.”

“B-E-A-U?” Willem inquired. “The Cajun spelling?”

“Considered it. But outside of Louisiana it would just cause panic. B-O is common all across the South.”

“Diddley,” Willem said, after considering it.

“Schembechler. Jackson. So, Bo it is. And I know you are Willem. Your father is Eng Kuok. Do you have a Chinese name?”

“Not really.” Bel had called him by Fuzhounese pet names, but those were totally inappropriate in this context.

“Willem it is, then.”

Bo did not insult Willem’s intelligence by bothering to supply an explanation of how the Chinese had come to know exactly where he was. Willem could work that out for himself later. It was probably some combination of:

(a) they had hooks into PanScan, which was supposedly anonymized but probably riddled with grievous security exploits,

(b) they were monitoring Beatrix and she had inadvertently spilled the beans, or

(c) they learned it from a Chinese grad student in Margaret’s group,

. . . but it was probably something way more sophisticated than any of that, some AI beyond human understanding. The point was the Chinese government knew that he was in Louisiana, they wanted him to know that they knew, and they just wanted to discreetly and politely touch base.

Despite some suspicions to the contrary, Willem had not, in the slightest degree, been “turned” or even influenced by China. And yet they did like to stay in touch with him—perhaps just reminding him that the option was on the table. As always, he would write up a full report later and put it in the record. Bo knew as much. Willem could have gone through the rigamarole of asking Bo for his business card, learning his official title and cover story, but he didn’t have the energy. The dude worked for Chinese intelligence, presumably out of the New Orleans consulate. He would have a cover identity.

Bo was wearing the flimsiest kind of blue paper mask. He reached up with the same elaborate precision as was used to handle the tea and unlooped it from one ear, letting it dangle from the other. Hard to drink tea otherwise. According to PanScan he was a cipher, a ghost. Its neural nets could discern that a human-shaped object was over there, but otherwise drew a perfect blank. Willem sighed and took his helmet off. Then he shrugged out of the reflective vest. Bo made the slightest eye-flick toward a minion, who rushed forward to assist, as if Willem were a grand duchess struggling to get out of her mink coat in the lobby of an opera house. A coat hanger was somehow conjured up and the vest ended up hanging from the awning’s edge to air-dry. Bo regarded it with amused curiosity, then raised his tablet and snapped a picture of it. “ERDD,” he said.

“Long story. Means nothing.”

“The Americans have not been very hospitable, but we thought that the least we could do was reach out and say hi,” Bo said, in Mandarin except for the “say hi.”

Willem was actually pretty sure that hospitality on a pharaonic scale was planned in Texas but saw no purpose in volunteering that.

“You are too kind,” Willem said. “Here, of course, they like their cold sugary beverages.”

Bo made a slight roll of the eyes and puffed out his cheeks, perhaps simulating one who was about to throw up, perhaps trying to approximate the look of one who had put on a hundred pounds’ Big Gulp–fueled adiposity.

“But of course that is not the true way to beat the heat,” Willem continued. He spoke the last three words in English and then raised his teacup to his lips. Chinese people kept emerging, Keystone Kops–like, from the RV. Bo raised an antique fan from his lap, snapped it open, and fanned his face. One of his staff members knelt and plugged in a little electric fan that was aimed in Willem’s direction. All these aides were brandishing objects that looked like cheap plastic simulacra of squash rackets. As soon became obvious, they were actually handheld bug zappers. The aides initially formed a defensive perimeter, but as insects were observed slipping through gaps, they broke formation and began to roam about in a sort of zone coverage, swiping their weapons through the air with the controlled grace of YouTube tai chi instructors, incinerating bugs with crisp zots and zaps while pretending not to hear a word of what Bo and Willem were saying. A brand-new thirty-two-gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck stood nearby, lined with a heavy-duty contractor bag from a fresh roll of same, already overflowing with the packaging in which all these fans, extension cords, bug zappers, and so on had, Willem guessed, been purchased from Walmart inside of the last two hours. Occasionally the burnt-hair scent of a vaporized bug would drift past Willem’s nostrils, but he’d smelled worse.

Bo seemed in no great hurry to get the conversation rolling. His eyes were tracking a group of three workers who had apparently come back to the parking lot on their break to use the portable toilets and smoke cigarettes. “A hundred years ago they’d have been black. Fifty years ago, Vietnamese. Twenty, Mexican,” Bo said. They were white. “Maybe this will teach them some kind of decent work ethic. What they are doing out there looks a lot like transplanting rice seedlings, no?”

He meant the ancient process by which flooded rice paddies were planted at the beginning of the growing season. It was, of course, ubiquitous across Asia. Each language and dialect had its own words for it. The term he had used was not from Mandarin. Obviously from Bo’s speech and appearance he was a straight-up northern Han lifelong Mandarin speaker, but he’d strayed into the dialect of Fuzhou that was used by Willem’s extended family. This could not possibly have been an accident.

“Yes,” Willem agreed, “this process looks very similar but here, of course, instead of growing food, they are creating new land.”

“It must be very interesting to you and the person you work for—the Dutch know more about this than anyone!” Bo proffered. The thin edge of a conversational wedge that was aimed at getting Willem to divulge more about the queen. Did the Chinese know that she was in Texas? Did they merely suspect it? Or did they know nothing?

“Oh, I don’t think you give your own country due credit,” Willem returned. “Earlier I was driving along the river where it runs between the levees, higher than the surrounding land. It put me in mind of the Yellow River, which as you know has looked very much the same since long before Dutch people began constructing their sad little windmills.”

Bo nodded. “Both a flood control measure, and a weapon.” He uttered a phrase that meant something like “water instead of soldiers.”

Willem recognized it. “You might be interested to know that the Dutch used exactly the same tactic. William the Silent, Prince of Orange—yes, the ancestor of the person I have the honor of working for—opened the dikes in 1574 as a way to rout an invading Spanish army. The gambit succeeded. Every year it is celebrated with a festival in Leiden.”

“Your adopted hometown,” Bo added, quite unnecessarily. “So you are a student of history. You’ll know that whenever those Yellow River levees broke, it was a great catastrophe. The emperor was viewed as having lost the Mandate of Heaven.”

Bo said this with all due wryness, as if to emphasize that he was not some pedantic blinkered scholarly idiot. Willem chuckled. “If you are trying to draw some analogy to the person I work for, then let’s keep in mind that her mandate comes from the people. In the Netherlands no one believes in heaven anymore.”

“In Amsterdam, The Hague, perhaps that’s true,” Bo returned. “Do you ever go into the east, though?”

“You mean, the east of the Netherlands!?”

“Yes.”

“It is a twenty-minute drive from those cities you mentioned!”

“You are busy. Twenty minutes must seem an age.” Bo took a sip of his tea. “Those clodhoppers in—what’s it called? Brabant?”

“North Brabant, yes.”

“They are still religious, I’m told. Conservative. Even reactionary.”

Willem didn’t like where this was going, but there was no getting around the fact that just a few hours earlier he had been standing in the hallway of his father’s house looking at a shrine, dedicated to everything Bo was alluding to.

“In my experience, people all over the world think the same way,” Willem said. “If there is a disaster, it means that whoever is in power has lost the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ and must be gotten rid of.”

Bo said, “Western historians write about this phenomenon in China in a patronizing style, because they believe that the West—”

“Has evolved beyond all that superstitious nonsense. I know.”

“Don’t you think that that proclivity for self-delusion makes Western leaders vulnerable?”

Willem shrugged. “You raise an interesting philosophical question of a sort that is amusing to ponder in one’s free time. My job is to remind a powerless constitutional monarch to send handwritten thank-you notes to schoolchildren and to see to it that the name cards are properly arranged on the tables at state dinners.”

Bo looked away, apparently thinking that what Willem had just said was so stupid that it simply couldn’t be responded to without a breach in etiquette. But it would always be thus. The Chinese were either too obtuse to understand constitutional monarchy—preferring to see it as a paper-thin cover story to conceal what was really going on—or else they were so infinitely more sophisticated that they understood the realities in ways that the self-flattering Europeans never could. Either way, the Chinese seemed to have much firmer opinions on the matter than Willem did. Willem was willing to entertain the hypothesis that Queen Frederika actually could wield serious temporal power, but it seemed too far-fetched, too at odds with the unassailable constitutional bedrock of the Grondwet to which he’d sworn himself.

“You are—what’s the English word? Underemployed. A man of your experience and erudition—arranging place cards? Really?”

Since that sounded like the germ of a job offer—which could only lead in the direction of incalculable disaster—Willem said, “I couldn’t be happier in my role.”

“Then you must have other duties that are more challenging—more interesting!” Bo exclaimed, as if this were a fascinating new revelation. “But of course, it makes sense. Why else would you be here—looking at this?”

“The obvious reason. Climate change.”

“Very important in this part of America,” Bo said agreeably. “Louisiana. Texas too.” He was watching Willem carefully. “Its relevance to Houston, for example, could hardly be more obvious. Waco, on the other hand—I don’t see the connection.”

“I’ve heard of the place,” Willem allowed.

“You’ve rented a truck there!” Bo nodded at this rather large and undeniable piece of evidence. “Dodge Ram, license plate ZGL-4737.” He raised his tablet and snapped a picture.

“This tea is excellent. You brew it at eighty degrees Celsius, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It is the only proper way,” Bo said, and enjoyed a sip. “Why do you think we were not invited to this thing in Texas?”

“‘We’ meaning China?”

“Yes.”

“You’re asking me to read the mind of T.R. McHooligan?”

“As a mere social secretary I thought you might have some exceptional powers in that area.”

“You must have been a teenager once.”

“Of course.”

“When you didn’t invite a girl on a date, what was she to conclude?”

Bo shrugged. “That I didn’t fancy her?”

“Or that you didn’t know whether she would accept the invitation. She might turn you down—with the attendant loss of face.”

“So if China wishes to be invited to such events in the future, she needs to flirt with T.R. McHooligan? To make him feel more confident?”

“I am merely speculating as to the man’s possible motives. I have never even met him.”

“Perhaps he knows in advance that we will decline his invitation.”

“Perhaps.”

“And that we will do so because his plan will be bad for China, and he knows as much—so why bother inviting us in that case?”

“It means nothing to me either way if you consider T.R. to be an enemy of China, or if he feels the same way about you. Even if I were in the habit of supplying your government with intelligence, I would simply have nothing to offer in this case.”

“Well said. I see why the queen likes you. She too is perhaps underemployed.”

“She has a job.”

“Well, I’m sure that your next few days will be extremely fascinating. I envy you that and will try not to have my feelings hurt in the manner of the jilted teenager you alluded to.”

“Somehow I think that China will endure.”

“Oh, yes,” Bo said. “It will.”

During the latter part of this conversation, Willem’s phone had been vibrating with increasing frequency. Only a few people had the power to make this happen. When he had at last extricated himself from the conversation, retrieved the ERDD vest, and emptied his tea-laden bladder in a stifling portable toilet redolent of industrial perfume, he sat down in his truck, A/C blasting, and found a string of increasingly testy messages from the queen.

> What are you doing in the Gulf of Mexico?

> Your map is out of date. Where I am it is now dry land.

> The question remains.

> Another feeler from Chinese intelligence. Will write up a report.

> Do they know where I am?

> Maybe. They know something happened in Waco.

> Are you going to drive back tonight?

> Yes, immediately.

> The Cajuns have a favor to ask of you. Can you find Port Sulphur?

> LOL that sounds relevant! Hang on . . .

Willem used the truck’s nav screen to find Port Sulphur. It was on the main channel of the Mississippi, about thirty miles downstream.

> Found it. Would you like for me to go there and pick up a truckload of sulfur?

> Sulfur is T.R.’s department. You’re to pick up a diver.

Half an hour later, Willem was there. He was a little crestfallen to find that there was no sulfur anywhere. In fact, there was hardly anything: no port facilities at all, just a fire station and two convenience stores facing off at the base of the levee. A couple of hundred yards in back of them was a faint swelling in the land, detectable only by a Dutchman, that must be what remained of the sulfur dome where they’d established the mine.

Jules (“as in Verne”) Fontaine awaited him, the only human in view. He was perched halfway up the levee on the pile of equipment cases and duffel bags that was the lot in life of a professional diver. He respectfully stood up when the white pickup truck pulled in beneath him. Debris of beer cans, Subway wrappers, and chip bags attested to the fact that Jules, by dint of youth, good genes, and an active lifestyle, could consume as many calories as he pleased with zero impact on the eminently fuckable physique on display through his tie-dyed tank top and his voluminous cargo shorts. He was neither gay nor, it seemed, particularly aware of his own fuckability—a common trait of the young. Willem had already been made aware that Jules was ex-navy. He’d been out of the service long enough to grow a shoulder-length mane of wavy strawberry-blond hair. Sun exposure had endowed this with highlights that would have cost five hundred euros to obtain in an Amsterdam salon. PanScan, unsurprisingly, pronounced him the healthiest man on the planet. Once Jules had heaved all his gear into the back of the truck, he offered to buy Willem anything—anything—for sale in the convenience store. Only because he did not wish to cause offense, Willem allowed as how some jerky would go down well. Jerky was a safe bet; it was hard to screw that up, and it seemed paleo.

After Jules had made his jerky run and settled into the position known hereabouts as “shotgun,” Willem said, “Say, Jules, I’m as eager to get to Houston as you are, but if you don’t mind I’m going to drive around town for a minute and sightsee.”

Jules was politely taken aback. “It’s not going to take a whole minute, sir.”

“I know. Just satisfying my curiosity.”

“Suit yourself!” Jules said cheerfully. “Your truck, your rules!”

So Willem drove a short distance inland from the levee and circled the former site of the mine. This was nothing but vacant land, overgrown with scrubby trees where it wasn’t scarred by traces of roads. On its south side there was a tumbledown building, scarcely more than a shack, covered in unpainted plywood gone dark with age and mold. Above its front door was a sign, hand-painted on sheet metal that was now 90 percent rust. But he could make out the letters azos min. The last vestige in Port Sulphur of Brazos Mining. Recalling the queen’s interest in the name, he pulled in close enough to take a snapshot of the sign.

“Okay then! Let’s get this show on the road, Jules!” Willem proclaimed and gunned the pickup out onto the river road, headed back up toward the Big Easy. Jules cracked open an energy drink, leaned his seat back, and regaled Willem with the tale of how he’d washed up in Port Sulphur. Willem was paying a certain amount of attention to the nav, trying to work out the best place to rendezvous with the rest of the caravan in Texas. So he didn’t catch every last detail. An ex-girlfriend was involved, naturally. An ownership dispute over a truck. A job on an oil rig that hadn’t gone as planned. It all might have worked out but for the element of random misfortune embodied in the hurricane.

“What do you know about the sulfur industry?” Willem inquired, interrupting Jules’s stream of consciousness about half an hour in. This story had overspilled the bounds of being a mere country song and was well on its way to becoming an album.

“Oh, there ain’t no sulfur in Port Sulphur.”

“I know,” Willem said. “Hence my question.”

“Used to be a mine nearby. They would dig it up. Freeze it. Sell the, what do you call ’em, huge, like, ice cubes.”

“Did you say freeze it?”

“It has a real low melting point. Like, you can melt it on your stove. Like wax almost. So they would just pour it into big, like, ice cube trays, let it set up, stack ’em like blocks at the water’s edge, load ’em on ships goin’ to . . . wherever the hell folks need sulfur.”

“Why’d it stop? Mine ran out?”

“It’s cheaper nowadays to get sulfur from sour crude.”

“So it’s just a by-product of all these refineries.”

“Used to be,” Jules agreed. “Then Alberta got into the act and the bottom dropped out.”

“Because . . . oil from Alberta has a lot of sulfur?”

“Sour as can be,” Jules confirmed. “Or so they say. Never been. Not a lot of work for divers there.”

Willem nodded. “So Port Sulphur needs to get busy diversifying its economy.”

“You work for Shell?” Jules asked. Then, feeling some need to explain himself: “They said you was from Holland.”

“The Netherlands,” Willem corrected him. “I guess you could say I have a professional connection to Royal Dutch Shell.”

“HR? Media Relations?” Jules guessed.

Willem perceived the nature of Jules’s problem. Jules was trying to figure out the riddle of Willem. Not necessarily to be nosy; it’s just that the two of them were going to be in the truck together for quite a few hours, and he was trying to find some basis for friendly conversation. The only conceivable reason a Dutchman would be in this part of the world would be to work for Shell. And yet Willem didn’t know basic facts about sulfur and its status as a by-product of sour crude oil refinement. The only way that this could make sense was if Willem’s role at Shell was something completely impractical in nature.

“I don’t actually work for Shell,” Willem explained. “It’s more of an indirect connection. I’m a logistics guy, you might say. Some of my group got stranded in Waco because of the weather. Your friends have been very generous in helping us out.”

“It’s gonna be real interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“Houston.”

“Yes. Yes. Houston is going to be interesting.”