HE FOUND MELANIE sitting at the bar on the indoor deck, laughing in a loud, flirtatious manner with one of the bartenders. She was dressed in a low-cut blue sweater, straw hat, tight, faded jeans, and boots. Her hair was longer than he remembered, and somehow her face seemed younger. Men all gave her looks as they passed.
“Greetings,” he said.
“Well. Hello, stranger,” she said, standing to greet him. They kissed politely, on the cheek. “Have a seat. I ordered you a beer.”
She was a luminous woman with classical features and dark, cascading hair. When he was honest, Jon had to acknowledge that she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met, although as far as he knew she had never had a substantial relationship with anyone. Jon glanced at the sailboats on the river, breathing the aroma of grilled burgers, fries, and seafood.
“That was quite a story.”
“Yes. You said that.”
Melanie slipped on her sunglasses so he could no longer see her eyes. “What was it like?”
“What was it like? Oh. Well. I mean … it was horrible, of course. But also surprisingly efficient. Not to mention well-coordinated.”
“How’d you find out about it?”
“Well. Long story.” Jon looked at his reflection in her sunglasses. He smiled. “You aren’t asking me to reveal my sources, are you?”
He said it in a joking tone, but Melanie laughed defensively. “Of course not. I’m just curious. It’s interesting. I was told pretty much the same thing, but in a different context. Who knows, we might even be able to help each other.”
“You think so?”
“It’s possible.”
“I don’t know, I tend to be pretty much of a solo act.”
The beers arrived, followed by crab cake sandwiches. The crab cakes were good, with chunks of back-fin lump crab meat, served on toasted hamburger buns. Her enthusiasms ran down a little as they ate and caught up on their lives. She seemed to become edgier.
“Anyway, the reason I called you,” she said, “was I thought maybe I could help you with your story.” She lifted her eyebrows and smiled beguilingly. “Your next story.”
“How would you do that?” he said. “And why?”
“The fact is, I wanted to write about some of this, too. Several weeks ago. But my editors wouldn’t touch it. Mostly because of the people involved. Also, it’s not really my beat.” She paused, wiping her hands. “I think I may have learned something you’d be interested in, though. Something that I suspect is sort of the key to the whole thing.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“Okay.” She sighed, pushed aside her plate and wiped her hands again. “Let me start at the beginning, okay? For me, this started six, seven weeks ago. With a tip. Which turned out to be the tip of an iceberg. Okay? The tip had to do with a group called the Champion Funds Venture Partnership, or the Champion Group.”
Jon nodded. He had written about the Champion Group, an international private equity investment firm based in Washington, months ago. Its directors and advisers included several heavyweight Washington political figures. Recently it had expanded its portfolio into several African nations.
“Last winter,” she said, “it funded, or helped to fund, a seven-hundred-million-dollar medical research initiative in the developing world known as Project Open Borders.”
Jon nodded. “I know. I’m familiar with it.”
“Okay? Which in itself seems a little bit odd, doesn’t it?”
“Not really. Health care is a part of their portfolio.”
“Anyway. Here’s the key part. I’m not going to tell you where I heard this,” she said. “Who my source was.”
“Okay.” Jon waited, watching his face in her sunglasses.
“Two sources, really. One a contractor, one an investor.” She screwed up her face. “I probably shouldn’t have just said that.” She smiled quickly. “Anyway. Both very reliable. And both told me essentially the same thing: There is actually a written plan describing all of this. What’s apparently going on in Africa right now was written out in a report that was only seen by a handful of people, including, possibly, one or two people with this investment group and maybe someone with the government. I don’t know. It’s called the TW Report or the TW Paper.”
“T.W. for Third World?”
“Right. Very good. The TW Paper proposed an aggressive political, social, and economic remaking of the Third World, beginning with Africa—before its problems begin to overwhelm the so-called first and second worlds. Okay? Or before China invests too heavily and annexes the entire continent.” She tossed back her hair. “More than that. It laid out a specific plan for accomplishing this within three to five years.”
“Ambitious plan.”
“Well, yes. That was the idea. The premise behind the report, as I understand it, is that much of the Third World is unmanageable. Mired in poverty, corruption, ethnic conflict, yada yada. But it also has the fastest-growing segment of the world population. Dealing with the problems of Africa and the Third World in the public sphere has become too political, and not very effective.”
“So the report proposes, what—a form of quiet pre-emption, in effect?”
“Of a sort, yes. And, apparently, it’s going to happen quite soon.”
“Does your source have a copy of this paper?”
“No. I don’t think so. But I understand excerpts are starting to show up on several Internet sites—or will soon. The paper was written by a consultant named Stuart Thames Borholm. Or by someone using that name. I have no idea who that is. My source knows but won’t say.”
She lifted up her glasses again and gave him a long look.
“Stuart—?”
She wrote out the name on a sheet of notepaper, tore it off, and handed it to him. Why was she telling him this?
“Strange name,” Jon said, studying it. “Thames—as in England. Isn’t Borholm a city in Denmark?”
“That’s Bornholm,” she said, making a snorting sound. “Anyway, I feel sort of like I’m in a game of chess and I can’t make a move. You know? But I also feel I have to make a move or we lose. How can you get anyone interested in something so distant and so complicated, though, in such a short period of time? I mean, to get the U.N. or NATO on board would take months.”
“Or years.”
“Yeah.”
“Is Perry Gardner involved?”
She gave him a sharp, defensive look. Melanie had a fondness for Gardner, the software pioneer turned philanthropist, one of the wealthiest men in the world. Gardner had at least a tangential connection with the Champion Group, he knew. “No,” she said. “But my source thinks this Borholm might be someone who knew Gardner and had a falling out with him. That’s as much as he’d say. He or she, I should say. Anyway, I’m going to be back in Washington tonight. How about if I stop by your place at lunchtime tomorrow. Okay? You can tell me then what you’ve decided.”
“Decided? About what?”
“This story.”
“What’s to decide?”
She shook her head at him and went back to her beer.
AS JON MALLORY drove back toward Washington, his thoughts were on separate tracks—still trying to figure out his brother’s last message to him while also compiling a mental list of people who might have “had a falling out” with Perry Gardner—former partners, business associates, colleagues.
There were several possibilities: ambitious men from Silicon Valley and elsewhere who had made their fortunes in the 1980s and ’90s in the tech world. Some had become philanthropists. Some had bought major league ball clubs. Some had become outrageously conspicuous consumers; one or two had found religion.