Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

THE STORM

The storm was hitting in a few hours. Willem had put a coat of allegedly waterproof polish on his cowboy boots and gone in to The Hague to have breakfast with Idil Warsame. Apparently she’d read the weather forecast too and put on a very sensible pair of flat-soled boots. In spite of that she towered over him when she stood up to greet him; she must have been over six feet tall. She had classic East African features, reflecting a mix of sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern ancestries. She made a vivid contrast with her friend, a much shorter and stockier woman. Glimpsing them through the restaurant’s window, already flecked with rain, Willem had assumed that the shorter person was from Africa. But when he got inside, and introductions were made, it became obvious that she was from Papua. Willem wasn’t the first person to guess wrong. The reason Papua had been dubbed New Guinea in the first place was that, hundreds of years ago, a Spanish sea captain had mistaken the people who lived there for Africans.

Sister Catherine—for she was a Catholic nun—and Idil had grabbed a table in the back of the restaurant, next to an emergency exit, all likely pre-arranged by Idil’s security team. These weren’t obvious—they weren’t slinging grenade launchers or anything—but Willem knew how to recognize them. They formed a gantlet spaced along the route that any assailant would have to take en route from the restaurant’s entrance to the table where Idil and Sister Catherine were sipping their coffee.

Sister Catherine evidently belonged to one of those relatively modernized orders that didn’t insist on wearing habits, though she was keeping her hair covered with a scarf. Now that Willem was across the table from her in better light he could see features that if he hadn’t known better would have caused him to guess that she was Australian. The three of them together made quite the cosmopolitan table. In The Hague, this wasn’t so out of the ordinary. People came here from all over because of the International Court of Justice and other global human rights initiatives. Most of them were here to represent populations that were being done wrong in one way or another, which was unquestionably the case with Papuans.

Willem looked at Idil and she looked at him and both of them simultaneously spoke the words “Beatrix says hello.” So that broke the ice. To Idil Warsame, Willem, twice her age, would be an éminence grise of the Dutch establishment, a conservative parliamentarian turned royal retainer, and that could sometimes make the ice pretty thick.

Sister Catherine was most amused, and the look on her face spoke of great affection for Willem’s first cousin twice removed. “You must be proud of her,” said the nun, “such a firecracker!” Willem had trouble making sense of her English for just a moment until he got it that she was speaking with an Australian accent. Then it all snapped into place. “You’ll have to be patient with my Dutch,” she said, reaching across the table and touching Willem’s forearm lightly. “Where I grew up, speaking it was discouraged.”

Willem guessed her age at between forty and fifty. Papua’s transfer from a Dutch protectorate to an Indonesian province would have been a done deal by the time she was born. So, yes, her schoolteachers might have been fluent in Dutch, but using the language wouldn’t have been a great career move.

“We’ll speak English,” Idil announced in a tone making it clear this was not subject to debate. Willem had been warned to expect bluntness. “This is scheduled for one hour, and we’re already ten minutes in; do you have a hard stop at the hour, Dr. Castelein?”

“I’m afraid I do. The weather.”

“Time and tide wait for no man,” Sister Catherine said.

Idil nodded and looked on the verge of delivering a statement but had to suppress frustration as they were interrupted by the waiter. While Willem ordered, she nodded at Sister Catherine, who began producing documents from a tote bag of impressive size. Willem guessed from its look that it had been produced by artisans in Papua.

“Look, there’s no point dancing around,” Idil said, as soon as the waiter was out of earshot. “It’s obvious something is going on around T.R. Schmidt. Geoengineering.”

“Where?” Willem asked. Not wanting to volunteer anything.

“Sneeuwberg. The highest mountain in Papua. Getting sulfur from there into the stratosphere.”

Knocked me for a loop! was one of those down-home expressions that Willem had heard from the likes of the Boskeys during the sojourn in Texas. For a Somalian-Dutch woman to confidently announce that T.R. was pursuing additional geoengineering schemes on New Guinea’s highest mountain knocked Willem for a loop. He somewhat prided himself on being ahead of the curve. An insider who knew such things before anyone else.

Idil must have read his stunned expression as I can’t believe you know about that! instead of Holy shit, first I’ve heard of it! “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not an environmentalist except insofar as it bears on those issues I do care about. Once we’ve gotten to the point where girls in developing countries are getting decent educations and being given control over their own bodies, then I’ll concern myself with T.R. McHooligan’s sulfur veil and its projected side effects. Maybe.”