“It’s the hair. Or lack thereof.” She looked across the room to see Fenna closely evaluating a very fit young Englishman, every one of whose hairs was exactly three millimeters long. Fenna quickly arrived at the conclusion that, while not lacking in potential, he was no Jules.
“Not like your chap with the dreadlock-Mohawk. Not conspicuous at all, that one.”
“Well, I hope word doesn’t leak out.”
“About the biggest gun in the world? That will be hard to keep secret.”
“No, that you are dining with a royal.”
“Oh, the aldermen will forgive me. You’re not one of those lot from Westminster.”
“What the hell,” T.R. said, “are the two of you talking about?”
Bob stifled a smile and collected himself. “As you know, T.R., I am the 699th lord mayor of the City of London.”
“The Square Mile. The financial district. Limey Wall Street.”
“Just think of it as O.G. London—the bit that was enclosed by the Roman wall,” Bob said. “We have always run the place as suits our purposes.”
“Business, shipping, finance.”
Bob nodded. “Now, some centuries after the Romans cleared out, grubby hillbillies with lots of sheep and sheep-based money—”
T.R. liked that. “Ha! Like our cattlemen.”
“Yes, they caused a lot of trouble for us, and to make a long story short people got tired of it and drew up the Magna Carta. Which among other things says ‘hands off the bit of England that’s circumscribed by the Roman wall, we know how to run that, stay out!’ The King of England may not even set foot in the Square Mile unless I invite him to do so.”
“Good for you!” T.R. exclaimed, but then threw a nervous glance at Saskia. She smiled to indicate she was not offended.
“So this banter between me and Her Majesty is a joke that goes back at least to 1215.”
“You and the British royals are natural adversaries,” T.R. said.
“There is a cultural divide between us and the, er—”
“I believe ‘grubby hillbillies’ was your characterization of my cousins at Buckingham Palace,” Queen Frederika put in.
“With sheep and swords,” T.R. added.
“Yes,” Bob said. “The divide is probably invisible to foreigners, who see us all as English people with similar accents, but it is real.”
Conversation went on as brisket, ribs, and red wine were brought out. Saskia stole a glance at Michiel, who was bemused by the ribs. Was one expected to pick these up with one’s bare hands and bite the meat off the bones like a savage? Fifteen hundred years after the first Venetians had fled into the Lagoon to found a new city, had it really come to this? He wisely postponed committing to any one course of action, picked up knife and fork, and went after a slice of brisket.
“Not a fascist, as far as we can tell” had been Amelia’s verdict at breakfast. The security crew at home had pulled an all-nighter trying to figure out Michiel. “I mean, we can’t read his mind. But if he has fringe political opinions, he has kept them to himself. Hasn’t associated with such people.”
“Who does he associate with?”
“Others like him?” Amelia threw her hands up.
“Meaning—?”
“Old Venetian families with inherited wealth.”
“Is there such a group, really?” Saskia asked. “One imagines that they all just intermarried, over the centuries, with other rich people who weren’t Venetians.”
“Still gathering data,” Amelia said. “I don’t think it is a large group. Maybe a few traditionalists from some of the old noble houses. His great-uncle seems to be a connector of some importance.”
“He did mention he had an aunt with him. Tell me more about this great-uncle of Michiel.”
“Banker—which can mean practically anything. Connections to shipping. Philanthropist.”
“What kind of philanthropy?”
“Mostly related to the preservation of Venetian cultural patrimony.”
“Well . . . keeping Venice above sea level would probably be important to him, then.”
“We should know more soon,” Amelia said. “But you could just ask him. Worst case, if someone posts a photo of you talking to him, and he turns out to be a nutjob, you can honestly say that nothing in his background or past associations provided any hint.”
“Okay. How about Sylvester? To begin with, the name.”
Amelia deferred to Willem. “Stallone,” he said.
“What!?”
“Chinese have been giving themselves Westernized handles for a long time,” Willem said. “The old-school approach is to pick something very conventional like Tom or Joe. By the time our friend ‘Sylvester’ was of an age to be thinking about that, it had become hip to choose cooler and more distinctive names. Sylvester Stallone was enjoying a comeback then. Lin liked the sound of it.”
“I wouldn’t have marked him out as a forward-leaning hipster at any phase of his life.”
“Other than that, he’s quite the straight arrow,” Willem said.
“They speak Fuzhounese to you.”
“I mostly speak English back. I remember very little of that dialect. It’s hard to keep it and Mandarin in your head at the same time.”
“What about this guy Bo? The Chinese operative who tracked you down in Louisiana?”
“The Chinese seem to know what T.R. is planning,” Willem said. “They are—I don’t know—offended? quizzical? concerned? that they were not invited. They are tending to assume, from that, that T.R.’s plan might be bad for China. That T.R. knows as much. T.R. knows China will naturally be opposed to his plan—so why would he invite them?”
“Is that actually the case?” Saskia asked.
“That it’s bad for China?”
“Yes. Has T.R.’s team done any computational modeling?”
“Have we done any?” Amelia asked.
“We don’t even know what the plan really is,” Willem pointed out. “Look. It’s not a question of good or bad, for a continental power like China. If you’re like us—or Venice, or London, or Singapore—you’re a speck on the map, right up against the ocean, and all you care about is sea level. Anything that puts the brakes on sea level rise is good.”
“And it’s rising because of the ice caps,” Alastair said, just to be clear.
“Indeed. So for us it is very simple: make the climate colder. Same goes for Venice and everyone else T.R. has invited. But if you’re anyone else, you have to be asking yourself what are the knock-on effects of that? How is climate in the interior going to be affected? Is there going to be enough rain? Or too much of it? Will we be able to grow enough rice? Will our hydroelectric projects be compromised?”
“And no one knows,” Alastair said. “Yet.”
“The Chinese seem to assume that T.R. knows. Based on what we’ve seen so far, though—” and here Willem broke off.
“T.R.’s just shooting from the hip,” Saskia said, completing the thought.
“We’ll know more in a few hours. Some kind of document is going to be handed out at lunch.”
After lunch the entire cavalcade—drones in the air, cars and buses on the ground—doubled back eastward, angling south so that the skyscrapers of downtown Houston swung across the horizon on their left. The sky was brilliant blue, interrupted here and there with huge roiling buttresses of cloud. These were blinding white where the sun shone on them, but otherwise a shade of dark gray that, to Saskia the pilot, suggested they were burdened with more moisture than they could handle. They were crowned with wreaths of lightning. She watched one such formation grope blindly for the earth with a fuzzy gray pseudopod. From miles away it looked soft and slow. It was even decoratively framed in a brilliant rainbow. But yesterday on the drive in from Sugar Land they had been caught in one of these. She knew what was going on in there. All the cars caught in it went blind. Most slowed down, some stopped. Collisions happened that would not be visible until the squall had moved on.