Termination Shock

It was an endless maze like all other hospitals, but eventually they found L & D. It did not seem particularly busy. Behind one closed door a woman in labor was crying out in pain. Clusters of family members sat in hallways. Nuns bustled around and glared at them. But T.R.’s was a face they soon recognized. No wonder, since portraits of him and Victoria were prominently featured in the eponymous Medical Pavilion. So they went unchallenged as T.R. led Willem, Amelia, and one of his security guys down a long corridor and then through a wooden door into a hospital room. No one was using it. No one had used it for a while. It looked next in line to be gutted and modernized. It was half full of stacked boxes of medical supplies.

“Thanks for bearing with me,” T.R. said. “I just had to stop by and see this, long as I was in the vicinity.”

“Why? What’s it to you?” Willem asked.

“I was born in this room,” T.R. said.

Before long an important-seeming man—a Filipino in a clerical collar—tracked them down and escorted them to an office suite elsewhere in the complex, where they camped out for a bit while T.R. tried to sort out his next move. To judge from listening to his half of various conversations, he would not be averse to simply leaving the country. But there was some kind of shutdown affecting Tuaba’s airport and so his jet was grounded. His people were organizing an armed convoy of SUVs that would take him to a residential compound on the edge of town, easier to defend than a luxury hotel. Willem and Amelia could tag along, or—

The “or” was abruptly resolved by the advent of Sister Catherine, whom Willem had last seen at breakfast in The Hague, last October. She denounced T.R.’s plan as nonsensical, though T.R. didn’t hear any of that because he was on the phone the whole time she was in the room. “We could offer you sanctuary here,” she said. “But to be frank you would be taking up space needed by others.”

This sounded like an opening for Willem to declare he wouldn’t dream of doing so, and so he opened his mouth. But Sister Catherine ran him off the road. “I can provide easy and safe conveyance to your uncle Ed’s if that is where you would prefer to wait this out.”

Her phrasing could not help but raise a question in Willem’s mind as to what “this” was and how long “this” was projected to last. Part of him wanted to stick with Western-style accommodation near the airport. But a lot of people who’d been staying at the Sam Houston had probably felt safer there, until they’d been hustled out of the building by cops and watched it blow up.

So he accepted Sister Catherine’s offer. Five minutes later he and Amelia were lying down in the aisle of a yellow school bus as Sister Catherine fired it up and pulled it out of the school grounds and onto the streets of Tuaba. Her proficiency with the vehicle’s manual transmission, the adroitness with which she gunned it through traffic, her hair-trigger approach to application of the horn, all made Willem wonder what other skill sets this nun had acquired during her (he estimated) three decades as a bride of Christ.

“You saw the gun?” she asked him, in Dutch. “Up on Sneeuwberg?”

“A very quick glimpse,” Willem said. “Then there was some sort of attack and we had to evacuate.”

“Still, it’s good that you saw it,” Sister Catherine remarked. “Not just the gun. The whole mine. So you know what we are dealing with. The scale of it.”

Noteworthy to Willem was the nun’s utter lack of curiosity about the attack. He raised his head from the floor of the bus and exchanged a look with Amelia.

He asked, “Do you think that the attack was related to the new gun project or—”

“No!” she said, with a brusqueness that gave Willem a glimpse of what it would feel like to be a dull pupil in her classroom. “No one here cares about any of that.”

“Climate change, geoengineering . . .”

“No one cares. Except foreign countries. And it is those who decide our fate.”

“Whether you will remain part of Indonesia or—”

“We are ‘part of Indonesia’ in the same sense that Indonesia used to be ‘part of the Dutch Empire,’” she said, and, in the scariest thing Willem had seen all day, turned around to look back and down at him while removing both hands from the steering wheel to form air quotes.

“Please overlook my poor choice of words,” Willem said, suppressing the rest of the sentence and keep your eyes on the fucking road.