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.

Not this time. Now the proud holder of a South African passport, the American fugitive was greeted as a hero, at the highest levels of government. One photograph spoke volumes, Cuban shaking hands with Nelson Mandela himself, at Mandela’s garden in Qunu.

I was especially fond of this picture because I set it up myself, working with the Great Man’s representatives, setting arrangements that taxed the Great Man as little as possible. Mandela’s importance as a symbol, since he left the Presidency, has only increased, grown more important, and getting his hand on that of a Virgin Maverick co-founder was important to the company.

It didn’t feel like flackery, but maybe it was. I just know it was an honor, an honor to do the work, an honor to accompany the man who’d brought me to this country, and a special honor to shake the Great Man’s hand myself, just before that picture was taken. Mandela reminded me of my own father-in-law, back in San Antonio, the strength in the hand, the life in the eyes. But his laugh is incomparable, and I went away feeling lighter than air.

Over the next few weeks the American Diaspora only increased in strength and power. The failing American economy, the collapsed dollar, and fear of what might happen less was causing people who might otherwise stay and fight the Bush Junta pack up and leave. Democratic Party leaders were upset, especially DNC chair Howard Dean, who said wryly, “I feel like I could scream sometimes.”

But he couldn’t bring himself to condemn the moves. Ben & Jerry themselves were moving to Quebec, to be closer to the cows, they said. Hollywood studios were relocating in Vancouver. Atlanta music companies were building subsidiaries in the Bahamas which somehow seemed to have all their major people in them. Software vendors who had outsourced to India now found more reasons to go there, and often stayed.

For those who were left in America, there was the feeling of circling the drain. I got a very sad e-mail from an old friend to whom I’d rented our house in Atlanta. “It’s like a dream exploding in my face,” Tommy wrote. His disability check from the military no longer covered his expenses, even when I told him he could forego the rent. He wrote he was afraid to even go to the store, because gangs of home invaders had become increasingly brazen. He’d bought a gun.

South Africa was now welcoming thousands of men and women, rich by its own standards, and completely unaffiliated with Virgin-Maverick. There were other growing colonies of liberal Americans in Canada (where the porn industry had settled), Australia and New Zealand (a big favorite with SCA members now being accused of witchcraft). Jews were moving from New York to Israel, European ethnics seeking a return to their families’ old homes. (I’d have to split myself in several pieces for that, I thought.)

But the biggest push was to South Africa. It was the new hot place for the adventurous, for the young, and for those who wanted to hang on to fame a little bit longer.

We didn’t feel like welcoming everyone.

Alan Dershowitz, for instance. He said he was in Cape Town on vacation. He said he was there to give a little speech at the University of Cape Town. So why was he spending so many hours at the Jewish Museum there, trailing both American and South African press, asking so loudly about anti-semitism in the country, questioning why the Jewish population had fallen so precipitously in the last 30 years (as though Israel didn’t exist, I muttered darkly).

We were riding a wild horse, I thought. The word Maverick in our corporate name was meaning more than we meant it to.

These weeks were good. Wonderful, in fact. All our bets were winning ones. The skin was going onto our new African Trade Center, a deliberate copy of that on the destroyed World Trade Center, only built on a solid steel skeleton, not the cement that had proven so easy to destroy in New York. The window of my own Carlton Centre office now faced only another set of windows and, when I ventured to look out and up, I found the top of the adjacent building increasingly difficult to see, which pleased me enormously.

Meanwhile, a second pit was going in, just a few hundred feet from the new Tower. The second Tower would rise even higher than the first, about 290 feet higher, to honor the New York victims. It would have a restaurant at its top, and we’d quietly recruited several veterans of Windows on the World to man the new kitchen. The top of the first building would be linked directly to the second, suspended like a bridge, and a garden was planned for the first building’s peak, surrounded by 10 foot walls for privacy, and to keep out the wind.

Heady times.

What could go wrong, then?

Plenty.