Termination Shock

“That would explain so much,” Alastair remarked. For, aside from the ruined church, all the other pictures were fully consistent with the decorative theme of “abandoned Warsaw Pact nerve gas complex and toxic waste dump on godforsaken island.”

“One doesn’t hear much out of Albania,” Willem said.

“They’ve been active the last couple of decades, seeking foreign investment, trying to boot up a tech sector and all that,” Alastair said. “Every so often they’ll pop up in the City with a stock offering or a real estate scheme.”

“Well, it would appear that Cornelia and her friends have risen to the bait,” Saskia said. She was swiping slowly through a series of photos depicting a Land Rover journey up a switchbacked mountain road.

“That scans,” Alastair said. “London and Wall Street are skittish about the Balkans because they don’t understand the place. See it as unstable. With this unfathomable history. But if you’re a Venetian aristocrat, it’s . . . like Ireland is to England.”

The road led to a summit where there was, at last, some new activity: construction trailers, a helipad, storage containers. All surrounding a flat area, in the middle of which was a drilling rig and a stockpile of drill rods.

“They’re sinking an exploratory shaft,” Alastair guessed. “The first step toward a bigger one.”

Saskia looked at him. “Perhaps you could have a chat later with Willem about extending your contract.”

“Oh,” Alastair said, “it would kill me to walk away from this now.”

Saskia flipped through the handout. “It would be illuminating to know how these maps and charts would all look if, in a year or two, a clone of Pina2bo were to go into operation off the coast of Albania.” She looked up. “I believe that Cornelia has made up her mind to save her city from the sea. And heaven help anyone who gets in her way.”

THE BLUE HERONS

There was a trope in the martial arts videos that was so shopworn that even Laks, generally not one for fancy critical terminology, knew that it was a trope, and that it was called a trope. It would be the traditional move for a filmmaker to make at this juncture, were it the case that Laks was a fictional character in a low-budget martial arts film called, say, Big Fish. It was called a montage. Not a training montage, for Laks’s training days were behind him. More of a “learning the ropes” sort of montage combined with a “meteoric rise to fame” one. The sort of montage that would conventionally end with Laks, head wrapped in a perfect Chand Tora Dumalla, climbing out of the back seat of a limousine in downtown Mumbai and cheerfully flinching from an onslaught of paparazzi and nubile fangirls.

In this particular case the montage would consist of quick cuts among a number of battle scenes up and down the Line of Actual Control, featuring various triumphs and setbacks. But mostly triumphs. Makers of martial arts videos did this so that they could cover a lot of story in a few minutes of screen time, and it worked. But in a way, what happened to the Fellowship next seemed even faster, more compressed in time, than that. Now obviously that wasn’t the case; it was spread out over a few weeks. But there simply was not time at any point to stop and collect one’s wits and tally up the passage of time. Just mad dashing from one place to another. All those places were hot spots along the Line, where the services of Big Fish and his crew—which was rapidly growing—were deemed useful by people like Major Raju.

But if someone had come along for the ride and calmly watched it all happen and actually kept track, what they would have reported was that Big Fish ended up with a crew (“The School”) consisting of: a dozen handpicked gatka practitioners in color-coordinated turbans, including Gopinder; a similar number of Gurkha rock-throwing specialists; and a ragtag irregular contingent of limited military effectiveness but mighty social media presence. Sam, Jay, and Ravi got shunted into that. Sam and Jay had become famous among British persons of South Asian ancestry. They had gotten some professional advice on how to wear turbans that would hide their scandalously non-observant buzz cuts. Since the School had started out with no particular color scheme, they took the path of least resistance and patterned their look after the red and yellow logo-wear used by Sam and Jay’s football team in England. Ravi had his own following among non-Sikh Indians, which to put it mildly was a significant demographic.