Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

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 Way-back 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.”