He knew perfectly well that the Gurkhas could have scampered past him and beaten him to the top, but they politely refrained from doing so. Instead they spent their oxygen exchanging war stories from this morning and laughing. So Laks got there first, unless you counted the three video drones from competing Indian television networks hovering up there to record the planting of the flag.
Some ridges, some mountaintops, teased you with false summits. This was not one of them. It was a wind-sculpted snow cornice with an edge like a hatchet. One moment there was nothing in Lak’s field of vision but fresh snow. The next he was looking a hundred kilometers into China.
Closer, of course, there was another valley much like the one behind him. Which was to say, new territory left open by another disappearing glacier. There was nothing down there.
No, wait a minute, there was a line of trucks, maybe four of them, invisible until now because they’d been buried in snow. Now, though, men were clambering over them, peeling back the tarps. The men were wearing those big fur-lined hats with the earflaps. Chinese winter military issue. Definitely regular army, not volunteers. For a moment Laks was afraid that the equipment on the backs of those trucks was going to be rocket launchers or something. That the cease-fire was finally going to be broken and that he would be the first casualty in a new shooting war. But the equipment didn’t look like weaponry. It was just flat round panels mounted on pivots. Like solar panels? But they were not aimed at the sun.
They were aimed at him.
Crickets wasn’t the right way to describe the sound. Crickets were quiet and peaceful and far away. Outside your body, anyway. This was inside his head. As if the cricket had hatched from an egg inside his skull and was sawing its serrated leg directly against his eardrum. He tried to wipe what he assumed were tears from his eyes, for his vision was blurred. But his eyes were dry. His view of China, the valley, and the trucks pivoted downward like a trapdoor as he toppled backward.
Informateur
The last power of any real significance that had been stripped away from the Dutch monarchy had been that of appointing the informateur. When a government had dissolved, someone needed to go around and have conversations with leaders in all the significant political parties and run the numbers and try to work out what the next ruling coalition might look like. When that picture began to come into focus, the informateur, as this person was called, would make a graceful exit and be replaced by a formateur who was usually the next prime minister.
The work of the informateur simply could not be done if all his meetings took place in the public eye, on the record. This gave it a smoke-filled room vibe that clashed with the overall style of Dutch politics. They couldn’t do away with the role, because it really was essential to forming a new coalition. But they could at least take it out of the hands of the monarch. They’d done so by an act of the States General in 2012 and the then queen had, of course, accepted this further curtailment of her already minimal powers. It was still a bit of a sore point for those who wanted the monarchy to retain some power. But it satisfied those who looked askance at kings and queens, while bolstering the position of those on the other side who could now point to the monarch’s utter lack of political power as a reason why keeping them around was harmless.
The upshot of it all was that during the day after the fall of Ruud Vlietstra’s government Queen Frederika had no responsibilities whatsoever in that sphere and so was able to do what was considered proper for a monarch in the wake of a natural disaster, namely to visit shelters and ladle soup for people who, had this happened in a Third World country, would be called refugees. She was photographed shaking her head in dismay at the wreckage of the Maeslantkering, reading books to children sitting on the clean carpet of a high-and-dry shelter, nodding her head and looking extremely supportive as a coalition of charitable organizations kicked off a fund drive.
Her lack of any serious responsibility, combined with the fact that she didn’t want to mess up any of the television shots, led her to shut her phone off during much of each day. Thus it was that while driving back from a visit to a breached dike in the eastern part of the country she turned her phone back on to discover the following series of messages from Lotte, delivered over a span of about half an hour:
> OMG ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND
> ????
> I can’t believe you did this
> crying
> Going to watch it now—finally downloaded. Don’t know if I will ever speak to you again!
> ???
> WTF!?
> Don’t remember any of this
> FUCKING WEIRD
> NEVER HAPPENED
> AM I GOING INSANE
> OK never mind all that mean stuff I said earlier
> WATCH IT AND CALL ME!
. . . followed by a link to a video.
Once Saskia had got through all of that, she saw a message from Willem:
> We need to talk about that video. 850,000 views and counting.
So far the most unsettling aspect of all this was that the normally cool and detail-obsessed Willem hadn’t bothered to supply a link or even to give any specifics beyond just calling it “that video.” He seemed to assume that Saskia would know what he was talking about.
Saskia hated doing this kind of thing in the car. She much preferred to just look out the window and enjoy the fact that she didn’t have to do anything. But it seemed that duty was calling. So she pulled her tablet out of her bag and, fighting back a powerful sense of dread, brought up the video that Lotte had linked to.
It appeared to be handheld cell phone footage. It took only moments for Saskia to recognize the time and place: this was the dunes in back of Scheveningen beach on the morning of the foam disaster a few weeks ago. Probably just one of many such videos that had been shot and uploaded by random bystanders when they had recognized Saskia and Lotte. This one had been shot while Saskia had been shaking hands with members of victims’ families who had gathered under the canopy to await news. It seemed that the streamer had been sort of weaving through the crowd, holding the phone up above his head, trying to keep the queen in frame, and not too far away, with varying levels of success. But at one point he managed to get a well-framed shot of Saskia looking almost directly at the camera, talking to someone who was not in the frame.
“One hates to be right about such a frightful tragedy,” she said, “but sadly this is just the sort of thing I have been trying to warn the prime minister about, if only he would listen. I worry that the next such disaster will be ever so much worse.”
Saskia had, of course, never uttered those words. She never would utter them. Though it was her face and her voice in the video, the diction was wrong. Like listening to Queen Elizabeth talking fifty years ago, running it through an English-to-Dutch translation algorithm.