An Audi was waiting for Princess Frederika on the pier, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble of climbing into it, so she walked up to the site in time for the tail end of the pre-meeting coffee-and-pastries mixer. Michiel would follow later; he had some things to catch up on with Cornelia, who was inbound from Brindisi. The day was sunny and looked as though it might turn warm, but a cool breeze was coming up from the Adriatic and the event planners had stockpiled electric fans that they could deploy if they noticed guests fanning themselves with their programs. But with the exception of the Norwegians and a City of London contingent—which included Alastair—most of the people here came from hot places. A lot of Arabs. Some Turks. Texans and Louisianans. Contingents from Bangladesh, West Bengal, Maldives, Laccadives, the Marshall Islands. Indonesians displaced by the flooding of Jakarta, Australians from a part of their country that a few months ago had been the hottest place in the world for two straight weeks. If any audience could put up with a balmy afternoon, it was this one.
The name of the conference was Netherworld. It had a logo, inevitably, and swag with the logo on it. The image was a stylized map of the world showing only what T.R. would have described as stochastic land: everything within a couple of meters of sea level. Deep water, and the interiors of continents, were blank. So it was a lacy archipelago strung about the globe, fat in places like the Netherlands, razor thin in places like Norway or America’s West Coast where the land erupted steeply from the water.
It was always a pleasure working with a fellow professional. Prince Bjorn had the royal thing down pat. He understood as well as Saskia that his job at an event like this one was to say a few words—just enough to sprinkle the royal fairy dust over the proceedings—and then sit down and shut up, smiling and nodding and applauding on cue. So he said his words, and Princess Frederika, newly abdicated but always a royal, said hers, and they sat down next to each other in the front row and did their jobs. Prince Fahd bin Talal, on the other hand, was from a place where royals still had some real authority, and so he took a more active role.
A series of panel discussions and solo talks had been artfully programmed to give equal time to the likes of the Marshall Islands. But the money was Norwegian and Saudi. Bjorn was here as figurehead, but the real power was a trio representing three-eighths of the executive board of the Oil Fund. That wasn’t its official name, but it was what people called it, because that’s what it was: a sovereign wealth fund into which Norway had dumped the profits of its North Sea oil production over the last fifty or so years. Last Saskia had bothered to check, it was well over a trillion dollars—the largest such fund in the world. And she should know; the oil from those rigs came ashore at Rotterdam.
So the Oil Fund contingent was two men and a woman, all in their fifties or sixties, dressed in business casual as per the invitation, in no way famous or recognizable. They could have been lecturers at a Scandinavian university or docents at a museum. But they controlled a trillion dollars that had been earned by injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. No accident that Prince Bjorn’s engineering talents were going to be dedicated to carbon capture technology; this was very much a case of a royal leading by example.
The Saudis had made a lot more from petroleum than the Norwegians, but spread the money out among funds and companies and individuals in a way that was more difficult for Westerners to keep track of. But it wasn’t unreasonable to guess that their host could tap into an amount comparable to what the Norwegians were looking after. And he probably had greater freedom to spend it.
