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

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

---

I’m not a PR man.

It’s where most journalists go when their careers die, or when they realize that they will always be under the thumb of editors and publishers and advertisers, that their own views will never make it into the paper or onto the air they claim to represent.

So they take the money. They go to a company, to a trade group, or to a PR firm. They write releases, they schmooze former colleagues, they set up interviews. And then they sit, their mouths shut, the moment the real work begins.

No thanks. I’m no good at shutting up. I’m no good at telling someone else’s story. It has to be mine, or fuhgetaboutit.

But when Richard Branson wakes you from a sound sleep and tells you to organize a press conference later that day, you nod sleepily, say “yes, sir,” and get to work.

I pulled on my old green-brown suit, tied my old school tie around my neck, and headed for the top of the Carlton Center. I was expected.

A secretary handed me a sheaf of papers, a memo dictated by the boss, a list of local press names and numbers, the name of an e-mail list. She pointed me toward a computer in the corner of her office, and when I was done composing a release, filling in blanks with a time and place she’d given me, I hit send and looked over my shoulder. The woman smiled sweetly, then read her screen, making a few changes to my work and hitting send again.

“You’ll want to talk to Mr. Hall,” she said then, and pressed a few buttons on the PBX in front of her.

“Thank you, Ms….” I tried.

“Fox. Samantha Fox,” she said. “Call me Sam.” She offered a hand, briefly, then pulled it back to press more buttons.

Sam Fox was blond, lanky, athletic looking, with perfect make-up, and dressed to impress in a black skirt slit to mid-thigh, red pumps, and a red blouse that buttoned two buttons short of her throat, revealing a hint of cleavage (but only a hint). She smelled like a garden, but just barely, and her smile, when she turned it on me, left me breathless for a moment.

But the moment passed quickly. She was three steps beyond me now, deep into her work day. I shuddered to myself, and turned around in time to see a familiar face crossing the floor from a door I hadn’t seen when I walked in.

“Dana!” he called. “It’s been a long, long time.”

“And in another galaxy. How did you get here?” I asked, with a smile.

Lee Hall was near my age. I’d known him off-and-on for decades, doing the trade show circuit. Sometimes he was representing a client for Bender, Folder & Spindle’s big Atlanta office, sometimes his card said he was with the company in question. Always had good stuff, but I hadn’t seen him often enough to develop a personal rapport, despite the fact we both lived in the same city, and covered the same stories.

He had aged well, I noticed. He was tan, his beard mostly white and cut close to the face, his eyes sparkling with good will, as they always did.

“I’ve worked for Branson companies off-and-on for decades,” Hall said in answer to my question. “He called me in as soon as he launched this deal, got me off the Bender roller-coaster, flew me here first class. You?”

“Business class. Mark Cuban showed up on my doorstep and adopted me,” I said.

“Your family here yet?” he asked. I shook my head. He frowned. “Well, this will get them here sooner, I’m sure. Or get you back to them in a hurry.” He led me through the door he’d come in through, and down a plain hallway, all bright fluorescence, finally turning left into a tiny cube of an office and closing the door as I took a chair.

He sat behind the desk and laid it out.

“Tony Leon is a pest, a nobody, but he can cause us a lot of trouble,” Hall said. “We don’t want to get into a pissing match with him, so if you screw up we’ve got deniability. We can have you on a plane back to the States in a heartbeat, no loss.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “Your idea?”

Hall shrugged. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I guessed you wouldn’t screw it up too badly.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

Hall opened a folder, pulled a piece of paper out of it, and pushed it across the table. “Here’s your Q&A. We’re going to spend the next few hours rehearsing it. Then you’re to put on your best smile, go into a little room over at the Sun building, and make it seem like you thought of it.”

I looked at the paper. It was pretty straightforward. Mr. Leon’s charges were thoughtful, but untrue. Virgin Maverick would work with any government, we had no position in the coming election. We are guests here, anxious only to do business and help South Africa grow. Most of our jobs are going to local people, good jobs, and we had no interest in putting any of that at risk (a threat implied there, unspoken, I noticed).

“Tony Leon is going nowhere,” Hall said. “His party was the opposition under apartheid, a parting on the left, and now he’s a parting on the right. He gets most of the white vote, which whites deny, then lines up at the end of the day like everyone else, with his hand out. The more votes he takes from the ANC, the more money goes into the hand, and the more friends he has to pull it out of that hand. Last time he got 13%. That makes him the official opposition.

“African politics isn’t like American politics,” Hall added. “Incumbents don’t lose here. Mbeki’s our man, but formalities must be observed. Elections must be seen as free, fair, and honest, so growth can continue. Most people know Leon is meaningless (he shoved a printed copy across the table) but America’s attitude toward South Africa depends on the forms being followed.”

“So this is all theater?”

Hall nodded. “If we put Branson or even me out there, it would dignify Leon’s charges, which are mainly true by the way. By having you answer the questions, in your naïve and humble way, we’re protected. The story is minimized, and if you blow it up we just throw someone else out there – me, maybe.”

“What about my blog? What about my family? I can’t just go back to the States with my written record against Bush,” I said.

Lee Hall shrugged. “You knew the risk was there when you wrote. We offered you an out, but it’s conditional on performance.”

“We?”

Lee smiled. “Richard,” he said.

“So he’s Richard now,” I said suspiciously. “Richard to you. Mr. Branson to me?”

He nodded. “But if you perform in this, maybe Richard to you, too.”

“And what happens then? I go back to my blog, to covering my story?”

“That’s the other reason we’re throwing you out there,” Hall said, his smile gone. “It’s time your site started getting a little traffic. You’ve done enough alpha testing. Already, reporters around the city are looking at what you’ve written here, trying to take your temperature. If you succeed at this, you’ll start being read by tens of thousands around Joburg, maybe many more. People read people they see on TV, and dismiss everyone else. That’s even more true here than it is in the States. You were never on TV there and so hardly anyone knew you existed.

“This is your big chance, Dana.”

So it was that a few hours later, I stood before a bank of microphones at the Sun, read a prepared statement, smiled my very best smile and waited for the onslaught.

Matthew Buckland of The Wail came first. A crusading liberal journalist, and an online veteran, I figured him for a friend. He wasn’t.

“Who are you?” he asked simply. “Why should anything you say be taken seriously by anyone here?”

“Good question,” I replied with a smile. “There’s no reason for you to believe a word I say. Except I just left my country, a country millions here want to go to, and I believe the future lies here. I have laid down my future, and my family’s future, staking it on the fact that Virgin Maverick can help bring prosperity and growth to South Africa, and more security for South Africans than even Americans know.

“Maybe that sounds silly to you, but South Africa is the greatest experiment democracy has today. I know it’s messy, I know it’s imperfect, but so was America 200 years ago, and don’t let anyone tell you different.

“We’re on the ground floor of something wonderful here, you and I, and there’s no place I’d rather be. Next question.”

And so it went. I didn’t say anything, really. I piled on the charm, I praised the country and its people, I referred to myself as an exiled American, and to my questioners’ audience as the coming hope of the world.

Maybe I was full of shit, I thought later as I checked in to the coverage from my room at the Sun.

But they bought it.