His ID—the credential that got him through the gates of this palace, and many other secure facilities in the Netherlands as well, was hanging around his neck on a cloth lanyard that was riding up above his collar and touching his neck. It was suddenly feeling heavy. Before he’d even really had time to think about it he reached up and pulled it off and let it dangle from both outstretched hands in front of him. “Until this matter is resolved,” he said, “to avoid even the appearance of any impropriety, I am placing myself on leave.” He dropped the credential on the table and turned around. As he did so, his gaze swept across the queen’s face. She looked stunned, stricken. Willem’s impulse, born of habit, was to offer some advice. To coolly analyze the situation, make suggestions, execute a plan, smooth it all over. But there were situations that arose from time to time when the monarch actually did have to be the monarch. Alone. This was one of those. “Nice enough afternoon,” he said. “Can I borrow a bicycle?”
Eight Months Later
There was an old joke about a man who is driving somewhere with an accordion in the back of his car. He parks the car outside a diner in a sketchy part of town and goes in for dinner. When he comes out he sees that the rear window of his car has been smashed out. He runs up to it and discovers that, while he wasn’t looking, some miscreant has thrown a second accordion in there and made a clean getaway.
During Rufus’s past life trying to operate a farm, he’d learned that this actually explained a lot about farm and ranch life. As soon as someone found out you had fifty acres, they’d remember a nephew with a dog that had outgrown his apartment, or nipped a child, and suggest that your farm would be the perfect place for it to live. Or they’d start talking about an old car that was taking up space in their garage that they’d been meaning to fix up one day and just needed to park somewhere for a spell—and a car wouldn’t really take up that much space on fifty acres, would it?
This, more than anything else, explained the condition of a great many farms and ranches Rufus had seen in his day. You started with good and simple intentions, and a couple of decades later you were living in a slum/junkyard/menagerie. Unless you drew a hard line and risked getting a reputation as a difficult person.
But the marble mine was not Rufus’s personal property and so he didn’t have final say over such matters. When word got around among Flying S Ranch staff that he was looking after Bildad, and that he had set up horse-related infrastructure, such as a water tank and hay storage, before he knew it he had acquired another horse—a senior citizen named Goldie—and two mules, Trucker and Patch. It was explained, by ranch staff who towed these animals up the road in trailers, that livestock had to be redistributed around the property from time to time as various stables and other facilities were consolidated and rearranged. It was a strictly temporary measure.
Rufus knew perfectly well that this was a polite falsehood. But he said nothing, construing it as job security and as an opening to file requests for additional goods and services.
The presence of all these animals, and the scent of hay, attracted a mustang whom Rufus suspected of having been part of Bildad’s herd back in the day. He named him Peleg, another Moby-Dick name. But everyone mispronounced it as Pegleg and took it to be a reference to the white sock on one of the animal’s forelegs. Rufus soon grew weary of correcting people and of explaining that the character with the peg leg had been Ahab, so Pegleg it was. Thordis seduced him into the fold with hay and Rufus settled him down to the point where a large animal veterinarian was able to knock him out and cut off his balls, which had been causing trouble. After a short period of recovery Pegleg became a model citizen, and Rufus got him reconciled to bridle and saddle.
What was true of horses and mules was apparently true of eagles. The facilities that these birds required, the frequent deliveries of raw meat and exotic veterinary supplies, meant that if you were going to have one eagle you might as well have several. Which generally meant that you also had to welcome the falconers who came with them, since they tended to bond with individual humans.
Thordis apparently had her own personal text message hotline to T.R., a distinction she shared with Rufus and, apparently, about one thousand other people. And, like T.R., or anyone allowed to remain on that list for very long, she knew how to use it: infrequently and always with good news or interesting new developments that would brighten the great man’s day or pique his interest when he scrolled past these little gems while sitting on the throne or waiting for a meeting to begin. The upshot was that, for reasons that were never quite explained to Rufus, a Mongolian woman named Tsolmon showed up with a golden eagle named Genghis who was half as big as she was. Three weeks later they were joined by Piet, a Dutchman who had worked on the original Schiphol Airport project. With him was Skippy, another golden eagle who was actually named after the airport.
All this coincided with a phase during which Rufus was asking himself what in God’s name he was even doing here. He had long ago got the picture that T.R. was the living embodiment of what was now denoted ADHD. He went off on tangents, a small percentage of which made money. It was just the survival into modern times of old-time wildcatters running around Texas drilling wells and hoping to get lucky. Sooner or later these initiatives came under the heading of “special projects” in his bureaucracy and then continued to be funded in some irregular and hard-to-understand way until someone got around to pulling the plug—probably while T.R. was looking the other way. As long as Special Projects were suffered to remain in existence they could bang into each other in the dark and swap DNA. Setting Rufus up as the Drone Ranger had been one of those. The only thing that had come of it so far was some improvements to the marble mine and the rescue and rehabilitation of a stray horse with a market value of one dollar. It would be way overstating the case to claim that T.R. had any kind of coherent plan for bringing the falconers and the eagles up to the marble mine. But Thordis must be telling him something he enjoyed hearing. Rufus didn’t know whether Tsolmon and Piet were being paid, or simply allowed to be on the property. Clearly it suited them. Tsolmon wasn’t much of a talker but she obviously knew her way around horses. So that was a load off his mind. Piet, though probably in his forties, had the physique of a fifteen-year-old circus acrobat and was a fervid practitioner of the sport of rucking, which apparently was nothing more than running around with a heavy weight strapped to one’s back. The general point was that neither of the new arrivals caused any trouble, and it cost almost nothing to keep them alive.
Rufus therefore came around to the view that his employment on the ranch was likely to be terminated at any moment without warning or explanation, but that while he was waiting for the axe to fall he might as well try to make himself useful to the falconers, who seemed to have momentum within what might optimistically be called the organization of T.R. This meant dropping the pretense that he could actually do anything useful, security-wise, with drones, over and above what Black Hat was already doing. Thenceforth he put all his drone-related know-how to work in the service of the Special Project that accounted for Skippy, Nimrod, and Genghis being here: the idea—pioneered years ago by Piet, developed further by Thordis, and still getting a bit of side-eye from Carmelita and Tsolmon—that trained eagles could be used to defend against hostile drones. The Schiphol project had been shitcanned partly because of protests from animal rights activists. Such people were, to put it mildly, neither common nor welcome on the Flying S, or any other West Texas, ranch.