“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.
By six o’clock, there were five names on Jon Mallory’s list. Business captains. Silicon Valley pioneers. Military and intelligence contractors. But there was a problem: none of them really seemed to have the motivation to write this TW Paper. With one possible exception: Thomas Trent. The more Jon read about Trent, the more likely he seemed to fit the bill.
Trent was a self-made billionaire, with a penchant for exaggerating and embellishing his own life story. Quirky but charismatic, a man of outsize ambitions and accomplishments whose cable communications companies had connected much of the world before the Internet. A man who had risen from a lower-middle-class upbringing to launch a groundbreaking media conglomerate, then branched out to computer systems and software. He was a bold and ambitious thinker who had recently proposed “shock therapy” solutions to the economic crises in the developing world, including disease eradication programs and the creation of new “infrastructure models.”
Jon combed the Internet for stories about Trent and learned more: Two years ago, he had spoken at a conference in Geneva on world population, making an impassioned speech that had been carried on C-SPAN and had made news pages and websites around the world. Jon watched a YouTube clip of the speech. Trent holding a crooked finger in the air, as if he were God reaching to Adam: “And I return again to a fact that bears repeating: Every forty-five minutes, enough of the sun’s energy hits the Earth’s surface to meet our planet’s entire electrical power needs for a year. A year!” he said, raising a fist. “We can redo the existing energy infrastructure in this country within the next decade. But to do it requires a commitment. We need to pledge ourselves to this goal the same way we pledged in 1961 that we would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade.”
Since losing controlling interest in his media corporation, Trent had become involved in a bevy of environmental and humanitarian causes and created what he told reporters was his “life’s most important work,” the International Environmental Trust. The IET claimed membership throughout the world, although it sometimes seemed a platform for Trent’s zealous, idealistic political and environmental views.
He enjoyed media attention, but Trent was actually something of a recluse, who moved among half a dozen properties he owned in the U.S., Europe, and Africa. If any place qualified as “home,” it would be his ranch in Wyoming, where Trent spent weeks at a time hunting and fly-fishing, or else his futuristic, energy self-sufficient seaside home in California, built into the bluffs near Santa Cruz. His third wife, a veteran cable news anchor who once hosted a weekly entertainment magazine show, had divorced him two and a half years ago, and he apparently lived alone now.
Trent often quoted 18th-century British economist Thomas Malthus, whom Jon Mallory had studied in college.
At twelve minutes past eight, Jon stopped reading. He pulled out a pen and steno pad from his drawer and wrote out a name. Then he began to rearrange the letters, pleasantly surprised how they all fit together. Bingo. At quarter past eight, he knew who Stuart Thames Borholm was.
TWENTY-NINE
ONE HOUR LATER, HE was standing with Melanie Cross in line at Starbucks on M Street. He ordered an orange juice, she a mocha. Her mirrored sunglasses were on top of her head.
“Okay,” she said, as soon as they sat. “So tell me.”
But Jon didn’t want to. Not right away. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me earlier,” he said. “About this TW Paper? I don’t know why, but something about it doesn’t ring true.”
“Come on,” she said. “What did you figure out?”
Jon deliberately waited before speaking again. Melanie tilted her head several ways, making comical furious faces at him.
�
��Borholm,” he said. “I think it’s Thomas Trent.”
“What?” she said. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
She opened her mouth, her eyes pleading for more.
“Although something about the whole thing doesn’t feel right.”
“Thomas Trent.”
“Yeah. Are you surprised?”
“I guess, a little bit,” she said. “Although, at the same time, it sort of makes sense. He’s used a big chunk of his fortune to fund land-preservation projects in Africa. He’s taken a keen interest in Africa, India, Haiti, Indonesia.” She frowned. “But what would tie him to this TW Paper?”
“What got my attention was this world population conference two years ago.”
“In Geneva.”
“Yeah. You remember it?”
“Of course. Trent gave a speech that was all over the news for a couple of days.” She studied him. “People said he sounded like a Kennedy.”
“Yeah. One of the people he quoted during that speech—and it turns out he quotes all the time—is Thomas Robert Malthus.”
“Malthus. Okay.” She repeated the name, as if hearing an echo in her memory. “The economist.”
“Right. Malthus predicted that the world population would increase faster than the world’s food supply. And if it happened, there would be natural corrections.”
“That’s the essay that influenced Darwin.”
“Right,” he said. “Malthus believed that if population wasn’t checked by mankind, it would be checked in other ways—by famine, epidemic, war.”
“A modern idea.”
“Well, yes. Which is why he has something of a cult following still. Because in some ways, Malthus was right. I mean, at that same conference, there was a report from a panel of scientists who made the claim that a reasonable population ‘capacity’ for the planet is somewhere in the range of two billion people.”
“And we’re past six and a half billion now?”
“Yeah. Seven. And while it’s not growing as much as scientists predicted thirty years ago, the way it’s growing is the real problem. It’s something people aren’t looking at very closely. Not nearly as closely as they’re looking at global warming.”
“The way it’s growing.”
“Yes. The majority of the world’s population growth is in the developing world. More than ninety percent of population growth over the next twenty years. And it’s already creating problems we aren’t dealing with.”
“Okay,” Melanie said. She cleared her throat. “And Trent is one of those who regards Malthus as something of a visionary, you’re saying?”
“He cites Malthus all the time in his speeches, yes,” he said. “I researched Trent a little, too. Hobbies, interests.”
“And—?”
“He’s an American history nut. Aficionado of the Old West. Loves word games.”
“Okay.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’m waiting. What does this have to do with this paper?”
“It has to do with Stuart Thames Borholm.”
“All right,” she said. “Who is he?”
“He’s not anyone. It’s an anagram,” he said. “For Malthus. Thomas Robert Malthus. Stuart Thames Borholm.”
She frowned. He handed her a pen and his notepad and she confirmed what he had already figured out. Jon saw her eyes studying the letters, her thoughts working.
“How did you get that?”
Jon shrugged. “Staring at those words for so long, I guess. I had a gut feeling that they didn’t correspond to any real person. I’m not sure why. The fact that there is no record anywhere of anyone by that name, mostly. It’s pretty difficult these days not to turn up in a Google search.”
“Wait. So, you’re saying, then, that Trent is the person who wrote this TW Paper?” she said, her voice becoming louder. “Who proposed this remaking of the Third World?”
“No. I don’t know that. I don’t even know that this TW Paper exists. For all I know, you made it up.”
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 wo
uldn’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.
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