“With all due respect to Dr. Schmidt,” Fahd said, “who really has accomplished something quite remarkable, we think that this is the future of solar geoengineering. The second wave, if you will. The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO2 into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .”
Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.”
Their loop around the plane ended at a cafeteria that had been set up in the corner of the hangar. Several rows of folding tables, a buffet line staffed by what she guessed were Filipino and Bangladeshi food service workers, the very latest in coffee-making robotics. “You must be famished,” Prince Fahd said, extending a hand to give her unnecessary help in alighting from the golf cart. She had to admit that a cup of coffee sounded good. Maybe a pastry. Lunchtime was over. So only a few workers were here, taking solo breaks or holding impromptu meetings. Saskia peeked over the shoulder of a man with close-cropped, sandy hair and a deeply tanned neck as he fluidly worked his way through the user interface of a coffee machine. By the time he had finished, she had an idea what to do, and without too much floundering was able to get away with a decent enough macchiato. She turned around and scanned the tables until she picked out Prince Fahd, who had chosen a seat conveniently far away from any other diners. He was scrolling messages on his phone. She sat down across from him and began to enjoy her coffee and her Danish. “A thousand apologies,” he mumbled, “something has come up, you know how it is.”
“On the contrary, this lets me enjoy my snack!”
She had been enjoying it for no more than thirty seconds when Fahd’s phone signaled an incoming call. “So sorry, I must take this,” he said, and stood up. He walked away, beginning the conversation in English but then switching to Arabic. Saskia gazed through the vacancy he’d left in his wake and saw that the sandy-haired man had taken a seat at the next table, facing her squarely. And his green eyes were looking at her squarely, with no trace of the atavistic deference that some people still afforded to royals.
“Your friend T.R. is quite a character,” he said. He spoke in a somewhat lilting, bemused accent that might have been Eastern European. But she’d seen enough circumstantial evidence to know that this guy was Israeli.
“Friend might be too strong a word? He does have some likable qualities.”
“Well, a person in whose company you have been seen from time to time, let’s say.”
“Only by people with truly exceptional powers of observation. But do go on.”
“He might be wrong, he might be crazy, but you have to admire his focus.” The Israeli emphasized that word. He liked focus. “Very important. Very good! But sometimes when you’re focused, you get tunnel vision. You don’t see the bigger picture.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know, things that come at you from the side.”
“I haven’t seen him in a while but I’ll be sure to pass that on.”
“He wasn’t at Vadan.”
“No.”
“You’d think he would have been there. To see his big gun go off.”
“It surprised me a little. But apparently he’s quite busy in some different part of the world.”
The Israeli snorted. “Different is for sure the right word. He has an eye for strange places, that one.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Look. I just wanted to say you might want to have a talk with your friend. Tell him to raise his head up out of that hole in the ground and look around. To be a little more aware.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Sources and methods,” he said. Intelligence-speak for I can’t tell you what I know because by doing so I might inadvertently reveal how I came to know it. “Maybe look to the north.”
“How far north? Oklahoma? Canada?”
“You don’t know where he is,” the Israeli realized. “He’s in New Guinea.”
Saskia was taken aback. It wasn’t so much that she was surprised by the news. Rather it was a sense of inevitability. Brazos RoDuSh, the selfies from Cornelia, Willem’s contacts with the Papuan nationalists . . .
“I suppose I ought to have seen it coming.”