Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

“To someone as old as me? Go ahead, it’s okay.”

“But I just wanted to say—because there have already been false reports on the Internet—”

“Someone on the Internet is wrong? I don’t believe it!”

“Nothing has happened. And nothing will, until she is of a proper age. But—” Here Bjorn got stuck again.

“But you would like it to happen.”

“I believe there is potential there. Yes.”

“Potential. A dry and somewhat technical-sounding way to say it. You’re an engineering student?”

“Not anymore. Got my degree.”

“Congratulations!”

“I’m going to work on carbon capture.”

“Well, you seem like a wonderful young man. Serious and self-disciplined. Respectful in the way you treat women. I wouldn’t want anyone in my family to end up with some playboy.”

From the look on Bjorn’s face it seemed that this term was unfamiliar to him. Once again, she had dated herself. “I think now they are called fuckboys or something.”

The bathroom door opened and Michiel strode out, staring down at the screen of his phone. His bathrobe was wide open, sash dragging on the floor, flat stomach glistening, his erect penis sticking out like the bowsprit of the royal yacht. “Something came up while I was in the shower!” he announced, snapping a photograph. Then he looked up.

“His Royal Highness Prince Bjorn of Norway,” Saskia announced, but before Bjorn could scramble to his feet Michiel had retreated into the bedroom.

“Like that,” Saskia said coolly. “Don’t be like him and we’ll get along fine, you and I.”

It occurred to Saskia that if she moved fast she might be able to reach Michiel before it was too late. “See you at the opening session, Bjorn, in—what—an hour and a half?”

“Thirty minutes, in fact,” Bjorn said apologetically, getting to his feet. His eyes darted to the bedroom door. “But, you’re a queen, you know.”

“More of a Dowager at this point.”

“Anyway, you can show up whenever you like, of course.”

“I’ll be there in forty-five,” Saskia said. “Tell them I’m powdering my nose.”

Crescent had many fine qualities, but at the end of the day it was a pleasure barge and its largest single room was a disco. That was the backup location for the conference, if the weather turned bad. But it was fine and so they met under a canopy that the event planners had pitched a short walk up the road from the pier, amid the ruins of the old fortified town that the Venetians had built there a thousand years ago. The remains of a church could be seen, with a pitted and broken frieze of the winged lion that was the emblem of that city and its long-forgotten empire. Across the way from that was a loudspeaker thrust into the air on a pole from which the Muslim call to prayer was broadcast five times a day. The construction of the big gun had drawn a couple of hundred Albanian workers to the island, and this was a largely Muslim country, so they were making do with this simple workaround while a proper mosque was being constructed nearby.

An Audi was waiting for Princess Frederika on the pier, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble of climbing into it, so she walked up to the site in time for the tail end of the pre-meeting coffee-and-pastries mixer. Michiel would follow later; he had some things to catch up on with Cornelia, who was inbound from Brindisi. The day was sunny and looked as though it might turn warm, but a cool breeze was coming up from the Adriatic and the event planners had stockpiled electric fans that they could deploy if they noticed guests fanning themselves with their programs. But with the exception of the Norwegians and a City of London contingent—which included Alastair—most of the people here came from hot places. A lot of Arabs. Some Turks. Texans and Louisianans. Contingents from Bangladesh, West Bengal, Maldives, Laccadives, the Marshall Islands. Indonesians displaced by the flooding of Jakarta, Australians from a part of their country that a few months ago had been the hottest place in the world for two straight weeks. If any audience could put up with a balmy afternoon, it was this one.

The name of the conference was Netherworld. It had a logo, inevitably, and swag with the logo on it. The image was a stylized map of the world showing only what T.R. would have described as stochastic land: everything within a couple of meters of sea level. Deep water, and the interiors of continents, were blank. So it was a lacy archipelago strung about the globe, fat in places like the Netherlands, razor thin in places like Norway or America’s West Coast where the land erupted steeply from the water.

It was always a pleasure working with a fellow professional. Prince Bjorn had the royal thing down pat. He understood as well as Saskia that his job at an event like this one was to say a few words—just enough to sprinkle the royal fairy dust over the proceedings—and then sit down and shut up, smiling and nodding and applauding on cue. So he said his words, and Princess Frederika, newly abdicated but always a royal, said hers, and they sat down next to each other in the front row and did their jobs. Prince Fahd bin Talal, on the other hand, was from a place where royals still had some real authority, and so he took a more active role.