She gave him a blank look, before realizing that he was kidding. Jon winked.
“Although it makes sense. Trent is an advocate of population control. Very interested in the Third World. He was also involved in the founding of Olduvai Charities,” Melanie said.
Jon stared at her, wondering now if she was kidding. “What?”
“Yes.” He waited for her to say more. She pointedly took her time. “It’s connected with this Project Open Borders I was telling you about. Supposedly, it’s helping distribute flu vaccine throughout parts of Africa.”
Jon remembered what Gus Hebron had said to him when he’d gone to visit him in Reston.
“Can you try to contact Trent?” Melanie asked.
“I did. I left messages at his three offices as soon as I figured it out. I don’t expect to hear back.”
She was silent for a while. They watched the traffic on M Street. Jon felt anxious. He still wasn’t sure what to do, how to figure out his brother’s latest message to him. He felt too wound up to write anything.
When he looked at Melanie again, he was surprised to see her staring at him expectantly.
“What,” he said.
“If we were to write something together, how would we list our bylines?”
“What?”
She repeated herself, frowning.
“Does it matter?”
“Just theoretically.”
“I don’t know. I guess we could switch back and forth.”
“Or maybe just the traditional way?” she said. “Anyway. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. I was just thinking out loud.”
“Okay.” After a moment, he added, “What’s the traditional way?”
“Alphabetical.”
“Ah,” he said. Like Woodward and Bernstein. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
AT HIS HOME above a private inlet along Monterey Bay, Thomas Trent was thinking again about Africa, his mind free-associating. Thinking about another evening, twelve years earlier, in Sun Valley, Idaho. A conference on the future of the Third World. An event that he had tried to push out of his thoughts. Panel meetings, spirited discussions about emerging markets for exports and direct investments. Videos about Africa’s most promising industries—telecommunications, construction, health care—along with a heart-wrenching documentary about the continent’s poverty and disparities.
Afterward, Trent had retired to the bar, where he drank Seven and Sevens for an hour or so, talking with his friend Perry Gardner, the computer software pioneer, and with Landon Pine, the military contractor.
Their conversation had started as one thing and become something else—a game, a series of hypothetical challenges: how they would make the Third World “work” if they had unlimited resources and opportunity.
“What if,” Trent had said, “quote unquote morality were not an overriding consideration. Or, no, let’s say, if morality were defined by consequences.” Lubricated by the alcohol, Trent had ended up telling them the idea that he had entertained in his imagination for years but never before spoken—a moral argument for how to fix the “Africa problem.”
That had been July 23—July 24 by the time they had finished talking and returned to their hotel rooms.
Much had changed since then. Gardner had become one of the wealthiest men in the world, launched the Gardner Foundation and now devoted most of his time to humanitarian causes. Landon Pine, a swarthy, uncompromising former Navy SEAL, had become a billionaire, too, his firm Black Eagle Services Inc., one of the largest military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. But then came a series of allegations that BES was, in effect, a private mercenary group, involved with weapons smuggling and crimes against civilians. After three of his contractors were charged with shooting to death more than a dozen civilians on a public street in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Pine bitterly gave up leadership of the firm and launched another company. But his life had begun a spiral from which he wouldn’t recover. As his marriage crumbled, he was twice arrested near his South Carolina estate on DWI charges. He was accused of securities violations and convicted of tax fraud. Two years ago, he had suffered serious injuries in a single-car drunken-driving accident in Florida and was, Trent had heard, now a paraplegic.
But twelve years ago had been a heady time for Landon Pine. For all three of them. The ideas they had tossed back and forth that night in Idaho were bold, reckless and, Trent had assumed, long forgotten.
Except that now someone had put them in writing.
Had produced a report called “The TW Paper.” Subtitled it, “A Consequential Rationale.” And all of a sudden, excerpts from it were showing up on the Internet.
The paper began and ended with the same two words: “Just suppose.”
His words.
At first, bloggers speculated that the paper had been generated by the CIA or the Department of Defense. Others attributed it to a think tank or a consulting firm. But the name attached to the paper in all the accounts was not one that Trent had ever heard before: Stuart Thames Borholm.
He had downloaded excerpts of the report from a paramilitary website but still had no idea what it was or where it came from. The paper was a puzzle, and he didn’t like puzzles he couldn’t solve.
Trent poured a generous splash of vodka over fresh ice and sat at his desk to read through the printouts again. Turning to a section titled “Options for Africa: Problems versus Opportunity”:
“DEMOGRAPHIC INITIATIVE, AFRICA. A model based on social realities in the Third World.
“The Africa model presents a number of useful case studies. Here we find a remarkable opportunity for investment and infrastructure development. But it is an opportunity that is being largely ignored by the United States, which is focused on the region’s problems instead of its potential.
“The mathematics of Third World demographics is something that China appears to understand and has been able to exploit with increasing success. But our government—and our private sector—does not, because it has not been able to assess the continent on a realistic and consequential basis. By not properly understanding these demographic realities, we are only making them worse and allowing an alternative scenario to unfold that will threaten our country’s cherished ideas about democracy.
“Consider: Currently, more than two-thirds of the world’s 7 billion people live in so-called Third World, or developing nations. The second largest continent is Africa, both in size and population. The United Nations’ list of twenty-five ‘Least Desirable Nations’ are all in Africa. It is a continent plagued by corrupt governments and by prolonged violent conflicts; with the shortest life expectancies on Earth and the lowest incomes. Less than 60 percent of the sub-Saharan African population can read or write; only 30 percent have electricity.
“It is a land of fifty-three countries and close to a billion people.
“Over the next 30 years, the world population will approach 10 billion. More than 98 percent of the projected population increase during this time will be in Third World countries. Most of these countries are not, and will not be, equipped for this burden. This is particularly the case in Africa.
“Efforts to ‘solve’ the problems of Africa are almost invariably misdirected and ineffective. Over the past forty years, more than $900 billion worth of development aid money has gone to Africa, for example. And yet living standards have shown close to zero improvement during that time. In recent years, high-profile activists have tried to ‘raise awareness’ about Africa without understanding the complexities of the continent’s problems—or the opportunities available. Most of the aid to Africa offers only temporary fixes and often, in the long run, exacerbates problems.