NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

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“You don’t know me,” the voice says. “My name is Mark Cuban.”

I search my brain and come up with it quickly. Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. He founded Broadcast.Com and sold it to Yahoo for billions of dollars. What in the world is he doing calling me on a Sunday morning?

“I’m at the Peachtree-DeKalb Airport and would love to meet with you,” the voice says. “We played in Charlotte on Friday, and I’m missing a game against Denver to talk with you. But it’s important. Is it possible you could come up here?”

Peachtree-DeKalb is a private airport about 7 miles north of us. “Well, we have a little family emergency at the moment,” I say. “My son has been wounded in the leg and the hospitals are all full.”

“Perfect,” the voice says. “Bring him up. Bring the whole family. I have a medical kit here, and my steward knows first aid. He’ll patch up your son and we will have a chance to get acquainted.”

“That’s wonderful!” I almost shout it, not because I’m going to meet a billionaire but because my son is going to be fixed up. I give a thumbs-up sign to Jenni. “We can be there in about a half-hour, if that’s OK?”

“That’s fine,” Cuban says, and clicks off.

“What was that?” Jenni asks.

“An offer of help,” I say. “I’ll explain it as we drive. Robin,” I shout to the closed door around the corner, “could you pull on your coat and come with us? John, we’re going to take you in the van to a man who can patch that leg up. Let me just move the car into the street and we’ll play the driveway game,” moving it in close to the house after the van is pulled out to drive off.

Five minutes later, the van’s heater is turned up, John is propped up in the middle seat with his leg stuck out and a tourniquet around the thigh, while Robin is further back, in what we call the “back-back” seat, with music in her ears and her thoughts far away. I’m explaining Cuban’s phone call to my wife and she’s giving me one of her “you’ve got to be kidding” looks.

The roads are quiet, even for a Sunday. There’s a policeman standing at Clairmont and North Decatur, directing traffic – the Emory Hospital is a mile or so west of him – but he waves me through to the north. In run out of things to say pretty quickly and we drive in silence, Jenni fiddling with the old van’s radio dials looking for an oldies station.

There’s a guard station outside the airport. A rent a cop bids me stop and I drop the window to talk with him. He consults a clipboard, matches the name I give to a list in his hand, and waves us through, telling us to head for the second hanger but stop at the second Gulfstream on the left.

As our dirty gray (it’s supposed to be white) van rolls along the tarmac, I see a tall stranger in a blue jacket emerge from a nearby plane. His jet-black hair blows stylishly in the light wind, and he motions with an arm for us to park near him. As we get closer I recognize the man and the jacket. It’s Cuban.

I get out prepared to shake the man’s hand, but he’s busy opening the van’s sliding door and helping our red-haired son. John slides out of the seat, puts his weight on his good leg, and offers his arm to the stranger, who takes it eagerly. Robin stops chewing her gum a moment to survey the scene, a bit wide-eyed at how gently tall, dark and handsome is treating her kid brother.

I can’t take his hand, so I grasp my wife around the waist instead. “I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Cuban,” I stammer. “We were really at our wits’ end.”

“No problem, glad to help,” he says. Then, to John, he asks, “how’s it feel to be a wounded war hero?” and John grins at him.

Just five minutes later three of us are arrayed around a small table in the plane, drinks before us, and the steward who served the drinks is stitching up my son’s leg behind a wall, and adding antibiotics. I suddenly feel like Cinderella, and I say so.

Cuban smiles. “Maybe you are, Dana. Maybe you are.”

“But how do you even know my name?” I ask.

“I know all about you, all that Google lets me know,” he says, still smiling. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he points out to Jenni, “but if I’m to offer someone a job I need to know as much as I can.”

“A job?” I stammer.

“That’s right, a job,” he says. “I represent a company called Virgin Maverick. We’re building a new kind of community in South Africa, and we need someone to run our newspaper. Of course, since this is the 21st century, I was thinking that instead of killing trees we should run a blog. I’ve seen yours and would like you to write for us.”

“You’ve read Mooreslore?” I ask.

“Mooreslore, a-clue, open source, I’ve even downloaded that silly Time Mirror novel you wrote a few years ago. Jim Baker in Hollywood. That was cute.”

“Yeah, well,” I begin, but Jenni pokes me in a rib.

“You like my dad’s writing?” Robin says behind her straw, filled with Coca-Cola.

“I do indeed,” Cuban says. “I like his speed, I like his sense of what’s news, and I like his skill with the technology, the way he grabs illustrations off the Web and sticks them into new places. We will need that kind of speed with HTML, and that willingness to try new things.

“Dana, I want you and your family to come to South Africa. I want you to blog for me, to write about Virgin Maverick, and to train others in the technology of 21st century journalism. I know you’re no programmer, but we’ll have plenty of them.

“Although we can always use more,” he adds, turning to my wife.

“I don’t think I match your skill sets,” she says shyly.

“Of course you do,” Cuban says nonchalantly. “You know Assembler, you know Cobol, you’re a subject matter expert at high volume transaction processing, and I understand you’re learning C++. You may be more valuable than he is,” Cuban concludes.

“When do you need us?” I ask.

“Right away,” he says, and the smile fades. “That’s why I wanted all of you here. I want to uproot your whole family from this place, bag and baggage, and move you all to Johannesburg, 11,000 miles away. I want you to give up your lives here, and the futures you planned, to build a new world half a world away.

“It’s a big decision, I know, but I can’t wait long. If I can’t get you, I’ve got a long list of others.”

There’s noise from the back of the plane, and my son hobbles out, wearing a new pair of Mavericks’ warm-ups and only a slight limp. “C’mon dad,” he says, “mom. Let’s go for it.”