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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.”

A
T 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
.

“One small example illustrates the larger issue: Over a several-year period, the World Bank funded a $4.2 billion oil pipeline for Chad to the
Atlantic on the condition that the oil money would be spent with international supervision to develop the country. The pipeline was completed in 2003. In 2005, President Idriss Deby announced that the oil money would go for the purchase of weapons and other budget expenses or else the oil companies would be expelled. The money has since been used to rig elections in the country but not for economic development. (Numerous other examples are given in Section 8 C.)

“Unfortunately, the factors that keep these nations from becoming self-sustaining, economically viable entities—famine, poverty, disease, corrupt and unstable governments, ineffective aid policies by the West—will worsen substantially in the next thirty years, and the repercussions will spill out of the Third World
.

“But these tragic demographics also present a business and humanitarian opportunity—to reseed Africa and the Third World, creating new infrastructure, opening up developing countries to global markets, and establishing regions of the Third World as models for new product development and urban and rural planning. To use money as a true investment tool, rather than as a Band-Aid
.

“We need to consider a pro-active model for salvaging what are in effect huge, troubled ghettos of the world, giving the people who live in them opportunities for productive and healthy lives. Perhaps the best way to make this actually happen is to redefine what we are talking about. To look at it not only as a tremendous business opportunity but, in the long run, something much greater—as a moral obligation.”

Trent skipped ahead to the next page:

“Consider a pre-emptive ‘what if’ versus ‘what if not’ scenario, akin to the runaway trolley model. If we had the means and the ability to change a disastrous outcome, would we be obligated to do so? The short answer is yes. As a for instance: What if we were to enact a plan to—in the most efficient and humane manner possible—stabilize some of Africa’s most troubled, suffering regions, to replace ineffective and oppressive governments and primitive infrastructure models with modern infrastructure and emerging technology—and to effectively replace populations stuck in unending cycles of poverty and disease?