I had a similar requirement.  You can create a custom module and use IMC to do what you want.  I'd share my module, but it has a lot of business specific stuff in it and it wouldn't work outside my environment.

Jan at Traincert http://www.traincert.net has an excellent video on IMC.  Basically, you create your links module as the "sender" and your content module as the "receiver".  When you select a link, it sends whatever parameter you want to the receiving module, which can then respond by rendering the appropriate content.  This is a very simple thing to implement if you do any custom module development.  The only real drawback is it does require a full postback.  I haven't tried doing anything like this with AJAX, but I imagine you could create a module to do it that way, if you don't want the page to post back to the server.