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

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I wish I had time to tell you everything that has happened to me this week.

But before I collapse let me hit a few high points.

I’m sure you read the big news, about the contract we won for the Virgin Tsunami Warning Network. Of course it wasn’t written as a contract, but a donation.

That’s Branson genius in action.

Yeah, I met him. At the press conference announcing the UN’s acceptance of Virgin Maverick’s “donation,” over at the Technikon. He smiled a little broader when he saw my badge. It read, “Dana Blankenhorn, VM.co.za, JoBurg.”

You’ll never believe what he said then. “So this is the famous Dana Blankenhorn I’ve heard about.”

Yeah, right.

But back to the deal. It’s sweet.

What turns the donation into a contract is a long-term agreement for managing a sensor network along all undersea fault lines. The network, and the sensors, go in free, and it’s all based on existing technology.

You know you can build a seismometer for practically nothing, and it can pick up an earthquake happening halfway around the world. Indonesia actually had a warning system, based on buoys, but shut it down in 2000 due to a lack of cash.

That’s the fine print you didn’t hear about on CNN. The WMO simply wrote a management contract with Virgin-Maverick, and its successors, extending 100 years.

It’s a fixed monthly fee, which starts getting paid out six months after our installation work is complete, and the government of China has already started collecting donations for an endowment that will pay off the fee while leaving the principal untouched.

Branson figures that, by splashing the V-M name and logo all over the world for six months, his costs are paid out of marketing, especially since it’s really just a matter of connecting existing systems using Wi-Max and fiber, linking it to a Web site, and having the UN empowered to broadcast warnings when they find it necessary. Plus he’s going to get some good people working on this, and can hire the best of ‘em.

But that’s the way Branson is. He sees opportunities, gets to them with his celebrity, then works the deal with principals and lets others pick up the ball after the lights go out. Ted Turner was like that, but Ted was funnier. I told Branson that after the conference. He laughed.

So let me tell you about where I’m living.

It was once called the Johannesburg Sun. It was a high class hotel mothballed a few years ago but now being renovated by Virgin Maverick. Now it’s apartments. The public areas have yet to be fixed-up, except that the main dining room is now a cafeteria. There’s electronic security at the door, but to look at the building from the outside you wouldn’t know it was even occupied.

That’s intentional. Things take time.

Right now about 1,000 people work at Virgin Maverick. Nearly all the foreigners live as I do, at the Sun, alone. The other workers are locals, and commute as to any other job in the Central Business District, over the freeways from the suburbs.

The hub of everything is the 50-story Carlton Center, which the government transport office bought for just $4 million a few years ago. If you can imagine how Atlanta’s downtown was in the early 1980s, then multiply the empty space and the squalor by a factor of 10, you’re just starting to get the idea.

You remember how it was when we moved to our little house, don’t you? It was 18 years after the Open Housing Act. Nearly all the area’s whites had abandoned the neighborhood then, selling for what they could and moving as far away as they could. Some are still fleeing.

Now imagine it’s 1972 again, only the city is like New York (and JoBurg is the New York of South Africa, not some regional center off to the side). The whites are all in the local equivalent of New Jersey or Westchester, and the CBD has been left abandoned, squalid, empty. There are some people trying to do a little business, mostly women with sewing machines or mini-entrepreneurs making tourist trinkets. But that’s it. That and the government, which still keeps its offices here. And you can’t convince those who ran to come back. You have to wait for their kids to get over things, as we did.

Only South Africa doesn’t have that kind of time. They can’t wait 25 years. There are too many poor people. Yes, the poverty here can be terrifying – in ways poor Atlantans find hard to imagine -- but did you know there are millions of other Africans willing to beg, borrow or steal whatever they have to in order to get here and call the same conditions “prosperity?”

We’re in a race against time. And Virgin Maverick is a time machine.

On a table in an inner office of the Center there’s a map no one is allowed to see, and all I can do is describe it to you. It shows the center of the city, with buildings and blocks owned by V-M in blue. Even before the deal was announced in New York last December, Branson and Mark Cuban had a network of cut-outs and agents scouring the area, buying land and buildings at market prices and holding it for future use. Prices asked skyrocketed after their press conference announcing the deal, but since we don’t start renovating until we’re ready for use prices have calmed a bit, allowing our agents to get back to work. (That’s another reason why the Sun building is still dark.)

On a whiteboard behind the map there are some figures that we update regularly. They include land and space prices per square meter, renovation and construction costs per square meter, and market rental rates per square meter. Inside a desk by the map is a box with index cards, names and addresses and notes on contractors and even workers in the area, with dots representing their reliability and honesty – green for go, yellow for caution, red for stop.

The office belongs to Deborah Wyatt. Her title is engineer. In fact she’s the development manager for the whole enterprise.

She’s gorgeous in a businesslike sort of way, close to my age. About 5’6” (it would be better if I said 165 centimeters), with long brown-and-gray hair that she pulls up in a bun. A chubby face, long nails she loves to paint red for the effect they have, a little chunky, but constantly moving, in her face, her eyes, her hands. It’s the eyes that get you, bright blue and boring into whoever is speaking to her.

We got Debbie from the Hines Interests where she had literally worked at the right-hand of the master, Gerald Hines himself, back before he went into semi-retirement as a globe-trotting ambassador for his company.

What she learned there, she told me when I met her, is attention to detail. I once interviewed Hines myself, when I was a very young reporter, but she had yet to reach his side by then. She was working on 1100 Louisiana, a building in downtown Houston marked mainly by its use of a piece of sculpture, Jean Dubuffet’s Monument an Fantome, to mark the site in the public mind at Dallas and Smith Street.

That’s how she met “the boss,” she said. It was the peak of the oil boom, but “the boss” always thought in terms of permanency. The sculpture would mark the site as central to Houston forever, he told her. She said that was why she demanded it, and told me of how she shook her hair out as she said it. That was the moment Hines asked her to work in his central office.

The physical relationship never went beyond some friendly flirting, and she actually became closer to Hines’ wife, children and grandchildren than to the man himself. He was midwestern, distant, completely un-Texan. But he gave her a chance to learn, and that was what she did.

“So now I’m teaching,” she concluded to me, motioning to two metal desks pushed together across the room. “Tutu N’deleya sits over there, Samora Boetang across from him. They grew up in Soweto, but both have gone to university. I sent them on coffee break while I talked to you.

“Dana, you are to treat these people with respect. You’re not to play any reporters’ games with them or use them for sources. You are to call them Sir and Madam, Mr. N’delaya and Ms. Boetang. Treat them as you would me and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Treat them differently and I’ll cut you off at the knees.

“Got that?”

I got it.

So let me tell you about the map. Downtown JoBurg is a bit like Houston was, straight line roads set between freeway ramps. But imagine downtown Houston at the bottom of the oil bust, filled with see-through buildings. And imagine that it’s gold underground, not oil, so there are hills everywhere, red and dark and dry.

“What’s the pink?” I asked. “I understand the blue as being V-M properties, but I see a lot of pink here.”

Wyatt smiled, a tight smile. “Gerald Leissner,” she said simply. “Apex-Hi. Downtown JoBurg’s rabbi. Buys low, sells high. A realist. If I can turn him without tipping my hand, I can have most of downtown in our hands.

“You know there are the equivalent of 14 of these buildings in this downtown area, standing empty?” she added. “That’s a 14% vacancy rate for the CBD. We had that in Houston, but we were able to turn it around because the vacancies were everywhere, and people believed in the idea of a center. Look at Houston now – the convention center, the ballpark, the tram system.”

“I went to Rice,” I said.

“I know,” she replied. “But people here don’t believe the CBD will ever come back. That’s the message Leissner sells whenever he’s interviewed, and it’s the conventional wisdom. Instead, black and white, they’re moving out to the local Galleria, the local Highway 6, abandoning the center. They consider it a slum.

We mean to take that center, cheap, then re-build it from the inside, bring in business from America, China, everywhere. And bring in a new class of people, too, people who like cities, who relish diversity, who’ll see Tutu and Samora as I see them, as diamonds waiting to be polished, not as…”

“Niggers?” I said quietly.

She nodded. “That’s the American word for it.”