The ZGL website refreshed itself. Superimposed on the preexisting 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 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.”