Editor’s Note: This is the eighth and final installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, From Hellmarsh With Love, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator each weekend in September and October, before its full publication on Amazon later this fall. From Hellmarsh With Love is the sequel to King of the Jungle, which was serialized at The American Spectator in Spring 2024. You can purchase it on Amazon here. And you can pre-order a signed copy of From Hellmarsh With Love at this link.
So far in the story, our intrepid hero, conservative podcaster and web publisher Mike Holman, married the love of his life, former Secret Service agent and president-saving heroine PJ Chang. After the wedding, Mike and PJ hopped on a jet for a honeymoon in London where all is not as it should be. Amid the growing chaos in Great Britain and the increasing disconnect between its ruling class and people, Mike changes his mind, thanks to PJ’s subtle influence, and begins doing interviews with some of the country’s movers and shakers.
The new Hard Left British government does not like that one bit, and Mike finds himself arrested on suspicion of conspiring to commit an act of terrorism. PJ is now thrown into a completely unfamiliar position, in a foreign country, beset by a hostile establishment that seems irrationally interested in persecuting her journalist husband. And after a vigorous and dangerous legal and political fight to free him, PJ learns from media reports that he has died.
Catch up on previous episodes here.
PJ tells us what happens next…
Liberty Point, Guyana, October 2, 2024
“Commissioner Brownleigh,” said the BBC reporter, “will you please walk us through how this happened? After all, no one has ever escaped from HMP Belmarsh.”
“And that is still true.”
“Is it, though? Technically speaking, Mike Holman did escape from the prison.”
“Rather than have an argument over that issue, instead I will take you all through the timeline. As is outlined in the packets you all have received, at 2:13 a.m. on the morning of 29 September, three simultaneous explosions were seen: two at the inner and outer walls of the prison, and one on the outside first-floor wall of Building 4 of the prison itself, which was at the location of Mr. Holman’s cell.
“All three explosions created holes in those walls which fashioned a path out of the prison for Mr. Holman, who had help from the inside of the prison…”
“I’m sorry, Commissioner,” one of the reporters from the Daily Mail interrupted. “How do you know that he had help from inside the prison?”
“We believe he escaped wearing a prison guard’s uniform and that he was led out by a member of the staff. Mr. Holman also was behind a pair of riot shields to protect him from the explosive blast.
“Now, as Mr. Holman and the traitor…”
“Commissioner, can you identify the governor responsible for aiding the escape?”
“No comment on that issue at this time. Now, as I was saying, Mr. Holman and the staff member fled through the wall south, out of the prison and through a hole in a chain-link fence leading to a car park behind an auto repair facility on Nathan Way. There, they got into a vehicle which made its way to the road and then headed west to the A206, at which time units of the London Metropolitan Police which had been dispatched immediately following the explosions gave chase.”
“How was the vehicle identified?” came the question from a Sun reporter.
“From camera footage and a 999 call from the night watchman on the premises, who spotted two men entering a black van as it traversed the car park.
“Now, the van then traveled southeast on the A206, followed by three London Met units. At this time there were multiple smoke cannisters activated by confederates of Mr. Holman’s along the road, which obscured the view of the pursuing officers and also the police helicopter vectored to the scene. Nevertheless, the van was followed from the A206 onto Longleigh Lane, and then to the Bostal Hill cricket ground where a helicopter waited to complete the escape. The area was covered with smoke, which prevented armed officers from apprehending the conspirators as they fled.
“But as the helicopter lifted off and began traveling northeast to the Thames, a Typhoon fighter jet from RAF Coningsby immediately gave chase and attempted radio contact with the helicopter. No response was given and the helicopter made no effort to comply with commands and signals to put down, and that was when it was fired upon.”
“Whereupon it exploded, killing all aboard.” That was the UK News correspondent.
“We’ve recovered no bodies as yet, though efforts to retrieve them from the Thames are continuing.”
“Then how do you know that Mr. Holman died aboard the helicopter?” asked a Sky News reporter.
“We did recover DNA from a bloodstain on a seat, and that DNA matches the sample on record with HMP Belmarsh.”
“And what do you know of who was behind the escape attempt?” asked a reporter from the Independent.
“As yet we cannot prove the identity of the conspirators, but clearly they were well-financed and had elite training. I’ll not comment on rumors you may have heard as to their backing, but I will say this: there is a certain arrogance and presumption inherent in certain men of great wealth. But this episode has shown that those who would attack the security of our nation and its egalitarian order will not succeed.”
That set off a buzz in the press conference, but then the prime minister stepped forward to speak.
“This has been a very trying month for the people of Great Britain,” he said, “but this failed lawless prison break, which we suspect was perpetrated by the same individuals who have made such vicious economic attacks on our nation, should put an end to the question of who has the stamina to last. And our citizens should feel secure that it is their elected government who will run the race to the finish line.”
Stormer was then deluged with questions, some about his burgeoning bribery scandal, others about the stock market free-fall, still more about the rolling power outages in Wales and the country’s midlands.
“Are you concerned that the RAF’s actions in shooting down a civilian helicopter will be seen as disproportionate?” came a question from an Al-Jazeera English reporter. Stormer gave the man an ugly look before waving the question away with a “No comment.”
“Well,” said Pierce with a chuckle as he stopped the playback on the big-screen TV, “that’s the official story.”
I looked at Mike, who smiled at me.
“Don’t laugh,” I told him. “You said it hurts to laugh.”
“OMG,” he said, faking a Valley Girl accent. “You are soooo mean. And just for that I won’t laugh.”
“I’m gonna poke you in those busted ribs of yours and then we’ll see.”
He kissed me then.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But if we’d told you, they might have had something to go on to say you were in on it.”
“No, I get it. I’m not angry about that. It was the right play, although that was literally the worst day of my life.”
He squeezed my hand and gave me one of his I-love-you looks. Yes, it sounds sappy, but I’d trade a lot of days like that terrible one I spent at the Hilton in Gdansk, with my Mom trying to calm me down, for a look like that.
Don’t forget that I’m still a newlywed. I’m entitled to feel this way.
“OK, Pierce,” I said, “I want to know the whole story now that it’s over. How did all this happen?”
“Are you sure you want to know all of it?”
“Yes! Of course I do.”
He looked at Roman, who simply held up his bottle of Banks from the comfy lounge chair he was sitting in.
“I’m happy to tell it,” Roman said. “I’m not keeping trade secrets from Mike and PJ.”
Pierce shrugged.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Well, for one thing, when did you decide you were going to break Mike out?”
“Oh, we started exploring that almost from the very beginning. You get faced with a crisis like this, and you need a plan for every level of it. So we had a legal strategy, a political one, an economic one and a…”
“Kinetic one,” said Roman.
Pierce nodded at him.
“But they’ve gone on and on about how nobody has ever broken out of Belmarsh. I’m a little surprised…”
“PJ, come on,” said Pierce. “Nobody has ever broken out of there because nobody on the outside has ever wanted a guy in there out badly enough.”
“All right. I’ll shut up. Just go from the beginning.”
“Wait,” asked Mom. “Did you move ahead with planning this as your ultimate option right away, or was there something that changed things?”
“Mrs. Chang…”
“Mary. Pierce, please. Call me Mary.”
“Right, OK. I’m gonna dodge your question for now, but I’ll get to it. Fair?”
“Sure,” she said in a friendly tone.
Mom was really pissed off when she’d found out about the ruse, but she got over that once the plane arrived to take us to Liberty Point. Now, she was as amazed as I was.
“So, OK,” Pierce said, getting up from his chair and reaching for the putter that he loved to play with when he was walking and talking — which was all the time.
“First, the plan was that we’d hire the best attorney we could find, and Brackett really is that. We actually figured like Mike did — this whole thing was absurd, and it was bound to go away. Get a high-profile defense lawyer who swings a big stick at the Old Bailey and you’ll back them down, because come on. They never had a case against Mike.”
“I still don’t understand why that didn’t work,” I said.
“Oh, we’ll get to that,” he said, looking out over the Essequibo River from the big plate-glass window of the den in his penthouse suite at the Grand Waica Hotel, where we were all celebrating Mike’s freedom. “In fact, it didn’t work for the same reason the political track didn’t work.”
I didn’t pay attention at the time, because I really wasn’t included in it, to everything Brienna had done trying to get the government to back down. But she had called me after Mike “died” to say how sorry she was and how appalling it was that he was in prison, and that she was really unnerved over the fact her direct pleas to Stormer, whom she knew well, were met with complete intransigence.
I mean, she’s the most prominent athlete in the UK. They’ve basically made her royalty. And even she couldn’t intercede in Mike’s case.
“It wasn’t just Brienna, either,” Pierce said. “We made some very, very lucrative offers to some highly-placed people in order that this thing would go away. It didn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I think I do,” said Mom.
“Yeah. Mary, you get it.”
“Because this wasn’t coming from Stormer?”
“No, my darling, it wasn’t. In fact, I think you might have even touched on it in one of our conversations. This was about Farris and Deadhorse, or the people who handle them. Turns out, Stormer is handled by the same folks.”
“Seems like a wild charge,” said Mike.
“You know I don’t make wild charges,” said Pierce. “And tomorrow your website will have all the proof.”
“Oh, and I’m in the dark about this?”
“Let’s call it a welcome-home present. Anyway, it became pretty obvious right away that the fix was in, so we weren’t going to be able to get you out with legal maneuvering or political pressure. The next step was something I really didn’t want to do, and that was the economic part.”
“The stock market and the currency stuff and the port strike,” Mom said.
“And some other things. I feel bad about that because I know there were lots of working stiffs who got hurt by it. On the other hand, those poor SOB’s were going to get hit anyway based on the policies of those idiots in charge over there.”
“Wait, Pierce,” I said, “aren’t you still doing the economic stuff?”
“Yes, but I have to. Let’s get to that eventually.”
“All right.”
“Let him tell the story!” Mike said, jokingly fussing at me. I stuck my tongue out at him.
“What’s interesting about this,” Pierce was saying, “is that we really didn’t have a good way in. We were thinking we’d have to hit this thing in transit, like when they were bringing Mike back and forth to court. But that’s messy, and people can get hurt that way. We absolutely didn’t want a plan that involved killing anybody or hurting them seriously. How you do that hitting a convoy with a prison bus is … well, it’s pretty hard.”
“I didn’t like that idea at all,” Roman said.
“But then all at once it got really easy.”
“Handsome Rob,” I said.
“I worked with him back in Iraq,” said Roman. “And he managed to reach out to me through somebody we both know, and he told me he had a handle on our guy.”
“How’d he know Mike is your guy?”
“People in the, uhhh … community know a lot of things. Mike is Mr. Guyana, you know. It isn’t hard to put that together when you’re talking about an old SAS operator.”
“Anyway,” said Pierce, “Handsome Rob calls Roman and says he’s in position to help, and so we brought him into the secure facility and we had a call, and he named his price and we did the deal.”
“And he called in a favor after your cellmate hung himself and got you moved,” Roman was saying to Mike. “Now you’re in a cell we know we can get to.”
“Not to mention Handsome Rob turned out to be a hell of a supply line,” said Mike. “It was a little like the Goodfellas prison scene the last few days.”
“Where is Handsome Rob right now?” I asked.
“He’s at the bar at the Liberty Lodge, where he’s been since he got here,” said Pierce. “That dude can run up a bar tab like nobody I’ve ever seen.”
“Once we had our man on the inside the plan got a lot easier,” said Roman. “We had the explosives to blow open a hole in Mike’s cell wall, plus the two walls around the prison. And we had the man to bring you out. Put you in a guard’s uniform and you’re gone before they even know you’re gone.”
“Plus the smoke cannisters,” said Mike. “You pretty much put up a fog all around that place.”
“Well, sure. Dead of night, plus a big smoke cloud, and now you have the enemy mostly blinded.”
“So Handsome Rob brings in a couple of riot shields? How does that happen?”
“I asked for a better mattress,” said Mike. “And they brought one in. Handsome Rob said I might find the bottom of the mattress will be a little hard and uncomfortable, but just to deal with it. Then he hands me a knife and tells me to cut that mattress open at the bottom. So I do, and there’s the two riot shields, a bomb blanket and a shrink-wrapped bag with a prison guard uniform in it, plus a note telling me to hang those two shields from the top bunk, put on my guard outfit, cover myself with the bomb blanket and be ready, because on the night of the 30th something big is gonna happen.”
“So how’d you get hurt?”
“It seems our explosives were just a little stronger than they needed to be,” said Roman. “The top bunk fell down on him.”
“That hurt like hell,” said Mike. “Edge of that bed came down right across my ribs.”
“You’re lucky they’re just cracked.”
“I’m lucky you’ve got lots of Percocet down here.”
“Anyway…”
“Wait,” Mom asked. “How’d you get the explosives in position to blow up those walls?”
“Drones,” Roman said with a smile. “We learned this from the Ukrainians. You can program a drone to place a shape charge, and that’s what we did.”
“When?” I asked.
“The night before. Big rainstorm came through, and nobody saw, heard, or noticed the three drones we flew into place with our little Semtex packages. And we had ‘em well-disguised, so unless you were looking very closely you’d never notice them.”
“It’s a really cool plan,” I said, “and it seems pretty simple.”
“Simple’s usually the best way to go.”
“Right, but what I don’t understand is the next part. Like how Mike died and yet he’s sitting next to me.”
“For that, you need to know about something called electrophoretic technology,” said Pierce.
“And I don’t.”
“Well, a couple of years ago BMW came out with a concept car that could change color with a press of a button. They put a special wrap around the vehicle that could bring different pigments to the surface based on an electrical stimulation. We’d been in contact with their engineers about using that for a number of applications for Sentinel Security.”
“If you’re protecting a VIP in a vehicle and somebody’s chasing you,” Mike said, “you can throw them off if you can change the vehicle’s color.”
“Exactly.”
“So we get everybody into the van,” said Roman, “and it’s black.”
“Then somebody calls into the cops and says ‘they’re getting away in a black van,’” Pierce chuckled.
“You planted that call?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. We needed to.”
“Why?”
“Because getting Mike out of the country without a massive manhunt depended on it.”
“Ahhh, I see.”
“We needed to have the police chasing a black van onto Longleigh Lane, which has tree cover over it so they can’t spot anything from above, and we’ve got the whole place covered with smoke so they can’t see the switch.”
“The switch?”
“Yep,” Pierce smiled. “The second van, which was rolling along just ahead of the getaway van, only it was green and nobody paid any attention to it, slows down, moves into the right lane so the getaway van shoots past it and then swerves back into the left lane in the middle of that giant smoke cloud. Perfect!”
“And then both vans change color,” said Roman. “Van Number Two goes from green to black, and Van Number One goes from black to green.”
“Then all it takes is for Van Number Two to turn into the cricket grounds where we pop off another bank of smoke grenades, and the chopper to take off.”
“But wait — who got killed when they shot the chopper down?”
“Nobody!”
“But who was driving the second van? Who was flying the helicopter?”
“That would be my guy Chris,” said Roman. “Best drone operator there is.”
“So the second van was a drone? So was the helicopter?”
“All it takes is money,” said Pierce.
“Oh, wow.”
“So while the cops were chasing the black van onto the cricket grounds, the new green van is taking a right turn onto Lodge Hill Road and parking in a little garage at the house where we were staying,” Roman said. “Everybody changed clothes and waited for the two SUVs to take us to Biggin Hill Airport where the jet bringing us here waited.”
“And then a day later, you two showed up,” said Mike.
“But they would know about the electrophor … what is it?”
“Electrophoretic paint,” said Pierce. “Yeah, maybe they would if we hadn’t rigged that van to burn up when the helo took off.”
“But how’d Mike’s DNA get on the seat of the helicopter?”
“Gave Handsome Rob a blood sample,” said Mike, showing me the little stick mark on his arm.
“OK, this is … I mean, it’s amazing,” I said, “but what now? I mean, aren’t we stuck here?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Pierce. “You might need to wait around for a little bit, but I imagine you’ll be home in Florida soon enough.”
“How? Mike’s an international fugitive the minute they know he’s still alive!”
“We’re getting that part covered now,” said Pierce. “And it won’t take long to get it cleaned up.”
“I mean, I don’t know. Pierce, with all the pressure you can put on that government, don’t you think this could have been made to go away without having to do a jailbreak?”
“Sure, probably.”
“Then why not do this the slow, sure, and safe way?”
“Well, two reasons.”
“Which are?”
“First, Mike and I have plans, and I don’t want to wait on them.”
“This is the Polk Global Freedom Initiative thing.”
“Yep.”
“You saw the notes I’ve written up on that, right?” Mike interjected. “I know my handwriting is shit. I’ve been typing on keyboards for decades now.”
“Psh,” said Pierce. “I took one look at that chicken-scratch and gave it to Rochelle to transcribe. She’s been feeding me your stuff as she goes. It’s really good. We should definitely work off your outline.”
“OK, whatever,” I said. “But what’s the other reason?”
“Honestly?” said Pierce. “Because they pissed me off.”
Liberty Point, Guyana, October 15, 2024
Before Donny Trumbull decided to get into politics, which at this point is like a decade ago, he did a reality TV show on one of the broadcast networks. It was one of these last-man-standing competition things, and they called it “The Lackey.”
Trumbull’s lackeys would get assigned all these tasks to see who could make really difficult things happen and who’d accomplish the most things working for his various business interests. And the signature thing that happened on that show was that when one of the contestants would get eliminated, Trumbull would call them in, tell them what they did well and what they didn’t, and then he’d say “You’re fired.”
He told it to me, too.
I mentioned, and of course this is what you probably know me for, that I was running his security detail that day he got shot in Terre Haute, Indiana. A wacko male wannabe woman calling himself Shirley Sterling was able to bring a gun into the basketball arena where Trumbull was speaking, stand right in the front and then shoot him, and then shoot himself, thanks to a couple of big holes in the Secret Service’s security coverage.
As the site commander for that event, it was on me. Except they’d pulled two of my agents off the detail without telling me, and worse, there were people standing in who looked enough like them that I couldn’t tell the difference watching the cameras from the command post.
Trumbull knew all this before he got out of the hospital. I’d gone in to see him, and he made the decision, rightly, to dump the Secret Service and go all-private with his security. So when he said “You’re fired” to me, I knew it wasn’t personal and I didn’t take it that way. It was actually kinda funny.
In fact, my response was “You can’t fire me. I quit!”
It was right at that point when I made the decision that I was done with the Secret Service and that I was going to turn whistleblower. The Great Peter Chang had called me and told me that he’d made lots of calls and Terre Haute wouldn’t end my career, that I just needed to play the game. And somebody from Farris’ staff had called and told me the same thing.
They wanted me just to play the part of the incompetent DEI hire — the half-Chinese chick agent who was in over her head, but so-what-because-it’s-just-Trumbull-who-got-shot-and-we-hate-him-anyway. And they’d move me to a desk job for a while, and when the coast was clear, I’d get promoted to something and then on up the bureaucratic ladder I’d go.
Beholden to that political machine my father was so plugged into.
And of course, that would turn me into one of those D.C. swamp players, and I’d bounce around the federal government until I’d end up in a position where I could do him favors for the asking.
I could see all of that coming, and I knew it was the only play I had left if I wanted to stay in government. Almost like it had been maneuvered that way.
But still, it was my dream to be one of the protectors. So I was agonizing over it.
Then when I saw Trumbull laying in that hospital bed, his clavicle broken but his face still smiling even with the knowledge that people in that political machine I was now going to be beholden to for my career were plotting to kill him, my decision was made.
“You’re really gonna quit?” he asked. “Pauline, you’re actually good at the job. And I know how hard you work.”
“I’m done,” I said, and I gave him a little of what I just told you.
He considered that for a second, and then he looked over at Heather Wells, his assistant, and he said, “Heather, do me a favor and text Pierce Polk for me. Tell him I’ve got somebody who needs a vacation down at his place.”
“Pierce Polk?” I asked him.
“He’s got this thing he’s building, or he’s built part of it or something. They say it’s really nice. First class. It’s in Guyana, can you believe it? Middle of the jungle. You’d fit right in over there and you can just hang out. You know, if you want to stay in the security game, be a badass, Polk is somebody you ought to know.”
Everybody in my business knew Sentinel Security. They’re the best. I just told you about Roman’s operation at Belmarsh; that’s the kind of stuff they’re capable of, and they never lose a VIP they’re protecting. So when Trumbull said that, I realized what a solid he was doing me.
“Before I’d go and disappear into the jungle, though,” I said, “I think I want to go very public about what happened in Indiana.”
“Ballsy!” he said with a big grin.
He gave me Jenny Wilson’s name and he had Heather text her my number.
And then he apparently mentioned me to Mike. And we did that interview about how messed up things were at the Secret Service. I blew the whistle, The Great Peter Chang lost his mind, and I lit out for Liberty Point.
And not too long after that, I met Mike for the first time in a social setting. I was sitting at the bar at the Liberty Lodge, which is more of a condo complex than a hotel where Pierce had hooked me up with a place to stay, and in he walked. He was down there for a bunch of meetings and to do a podcast, and we started talking and…
Well, you know the rest where our relationship is concerned.
But here’s the thing: I loved it at Liberty Point. It was separate from everything I’d known — my Dad wasn’t involved, there was no power structure I had to fit into, it was just a whole bunch of cool people pretty much all of whom were alpha types who didn’t take any crap off anybody and who worked hard, played hard, and were serious about freedom.
A whole lot of them were ex-military. Most of them, in fact. All my life I wanted to be one of the protectors and here was an entire community full of them. I was home. It’s a Galt’s Gulch type of place, but maybe with more guns.
Anyway, when the Venezuelans attacked, I basically drafted myself into Pierce’s little army, although I didn’t really have a lot to offer. I know how to shoot, obviously, but I wasn’t a combat veteran. Instead of having me go on some of the missions they were running, what he suggested was that I hook up with Flip Hardison, who worked for Sentinel Security and was living in Liberty Point and doing some work as a correspondent for Holman Media. Flip and I ended up becoming a pretty good little journalistic team, him writing and me taking pictures, and the stuff we did for the Holman Media site was actually pretty awesome.
So much so that we kicked around the idea of making a documentary on the Venezuela–Guyana war.
And after Mike and I had finished our private welcome-home celebrations, that was the thing he asked me about.
“Are you guys done with the film?”
“Honestly, I haven’t even really thought about it,” I said.
“PJ, dammit, you had all that dead time in London and you did nothing?”
“Hey, I’m sorry! I was … preoccupied.”
“I appreciate that, babe, but you have all that footage nobody’s even seen, and that war is going to go stale in everybody’s mind. You need to get off your ass, get together with Flip and finish it.”
“I might need some help,” I said.
“OK. What do you need?”
“How about a narrator?”
“But I’m a dead guy. How am I gonna narrate your movie?”
“That’s really funny. Hey, as far as anybody knows these would be the last public words of Mike Holman.”
He cocked his head like he was considering it, and then he laughed.
“Of course I’ll do it. But you should get Kaylee and Melissa down here and have them help.”
At that point the only people at Holman Media who knew Mike was still alive were Tom, Megan, and Colby. They were sworn to secrecy. We didn’t want that to get out, because Brackett and Neville were back in the UK making a big stink over how they’d murdered Mike and his rescuers, and it was becoming a real international embarrassment for Stormer.
Plus, Pierce was doing all kinds of things to step up the pressure on that government.
The aim was to get them to agree to drop all charges against Mike posthumously, and even to agree that nobody would be prosecuted for organizing the escape.
Mike had to stay dead until that could happen. So we had to really restrict who could know.
We made sure Emily knew, though. I was afraid her heart would give out when she heard her son was dead, and I insisted that Pierce let us tell her the good news. She was so overjoyed to hear his voice that all of us were in tears about it.
And then Pierce flew her down to Liberty Point. They put her on this really great heart medicine, and now she’s spending every morning on the roof of the Liberty Lodge hitting golf balls into the Essequibo from the driving range they have there.
Don’t worry. Those balls are biodegradable. They basically just dissolve in the river. It’s pretty cool.
So we flew Kaylee and Melissa down from Atlanta, and when we picked them up at the airport here they both squealed like little piglets to see Mike alive. That was very cool.
It turns out that Flip had pretty much written the whole thing out, and what he had was great. Mike told him he was the best journalist he’d ever seen.
“It helps when you actually held a rifle if you’re gonna report on a war,” Flip said. Mike told him he agreed.
And the five of us spent 10 days basically working nonstop to put that documentary together. We did a one-time streaming showing at Holman Media, which had more than a million people watching the stream at ten bucks a pop, and Tom is negotiating with the TV networks to sell it for a fortune.
Everything Mike Holman is huge right now. People can’t get enough. It’s like the artist who dies and all of a sudden his paintings go sky-high in value.
But in Mike’s case there was a twist. I’m talking about the “He Lives” thing.
We didn’t start that. In fact, we didn’t have anything to do with it. It was Thomason’s crowd who got it started in the UK.
I mentioned that there was a huge outcry over the downing of that helicopter. But there was also a huge amount of distrust of the government when they couldn’t produce Mike’s body from the Thames. And then all of a sudden somebody made up a poster of Mike’s face with his mug shot, which incidentally I’m told the police weren’t supposed to release but of course they did, and he had a super-combative look on his face in it, and it was really stylized in black and white and a “He Lives” scrawled across the bottom in almost a slasher-movie style.
It was a really striking image. And within a few days after the first poster showed up on a wall across the street from Number 10 Downing Street and went viral on social media, there were thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of those posters all over the place in the UK.
And in no time flat they were all over the world. I’m talking about the space of a week. People were taking the “He Lives” image and making it their Facebook or X profile image. “He Lives” t-shirts were all over the place. Jason Aldean wore one when he performed at the American Country Music Awards, and, well, boom.
We couldn’t stop laughing about that. Here was Pierce, pressuring the British government to drop all the charges, and there they were insisting Mike was deader than Elvis even though they didn’t have a body, and about a week later they announced they were “reviewing” the case.
Because if Mike was dead, what was the point?
The point was Robby Thomason, of course. Because if you were going to charge Mike with conspiring to commit a terrorist act and Thomason was his co-conspirator, and if the demonstration planned for October 16 wasn’t going to contain any terrorism, then you’d sure look stupid, wouldn’t you?
But it wouldn’t be good to take the step of trying to make Mike a conspirator for simply interviewing Thomason, and then cutting Mike loose while still prosecuting Thomason.
On the other hand, nobody was doing things to shut down the British economy, and the protests in the streets were growing rather than petering out at this point with the country’s woes as the main fuel, over Robby Thomason. That was happening because of Pierce, and he was doing it because of Mike.
They cracked. They had to. Brienna Givens announced she was emigrating to Guyana because of the new wealth tax the government was proposing. And in her statement that she gave at a press conference she noted that she felt like she would have to leave now, because if she stayed around and criticized their idiotic tax policy she’d end up in jail like Mike did.
It was a disaster, and a bunch of Labour MPs were starting to desert Stormer. There was a lot of talk about a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. He was giving press conferences every day trying to stop the bleeding, but it wasn’t working.
That’s when Pierce sent word to Stormer that he’d be interested in meeting with him in person. He invited him to Liberty Point.
Stormer initially said no. But a couple of days later, after Neville did an interview on Sky News declaring the Mike Holman debacle was a setup that originated with the Deadhorse administration in the United States, and that Stormer was a puppet of the noted left-wing currency speculator and investor Serge Goroz and his son Alberto, Stormer didn’t have a choice. He needed to get some closure.
And so when Stormer got off the plane at the airport, Pierce was there to greet him. He was super friendly, and there was a big convoy bringing the PM to Liberty Point. All the buildings in the city were decked out with union jacks and the St. George flag, which was a little bit of a shot at him since the St. George flag was a symbol of the For England movement.
Anyway, Pierce led Stormer up to his suite at the Grand Waica, and that’s where Stormer met Mike.
And yes, that scene was every bit as good as you imagine it was. Pierce and I both took pictures of Stormer’s reaction.
Then a bunch of us sat down at Pierce’s conference table, and that’s where Pierce laid down the law.
“Piers,” he said, “I can make that port strike go away today. I’m pretty sure I can convince the hedge-fund guys who are shorting the pound take their profits and go home. I’ll happily pump some liquidity into your stock market; we now have our little Exchange of the Americas about to go up here at Liberty Point the first part of next year, and we’ll be glad to do a deal with your folks that boosts confidence and thaws your markets out. And I’m pretty sure we can work that oil and gas deal you guys need done with the guys in Georgetown. That’s going to loosen the noose around your party’s neck, right?”
“It would help, certainly,” Stormer said. He was waiting for the ask, and it was like he was cringing.
“This is going to be good,” Mike whispered in my ear.
I gave him a little nod.
Pierce looked at us and grinned.
“But here’s what you’re going to do for me,” he said. “You’re going to get the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the charges against Mike and you’re going to issue a formal apology for ever having brought them.”
“As I’ve said, we’re reviewing…”
“You’ve already done enough reviewing. Let’s just get that done. And while you’re at it, I’d like you to get either the Home Secretary or the Justice Secretary, whichever one of them is willing to take the bullet, to petition the king for a pardon to Mike and whoever helped him escape.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s possible.”
“See, I disagree with you. I think it’s not just possible but damned likely, and I’ll tell you why.”
Stormer really was cringing this time.
“Hey, can I get you something? Manny’s the bartender downstairs and he makes a gin gimlet that’ll knock your socks off. Would you like one?”
The PM nodded.
“Great! In fact, let’s all have one! Hang on…”
“I can take care of that,” I said, and I ducked out and told Rochelle, Pierce’s assistant who was just outside, that we needed a half-dozen gin gimlets from the bar.
Five minutes later there was a tray of them laid down on the table and we all had one. Pierce wasn’t lying; they were awfully good.
But by then Stormer needed two of them.
Because when I ducked back into the conference room, Pierce was telling Stormer about the proof he had that Neville Savage was right.
And oh, what proof he had.
It turned out that Deadhorse’s idiot drug-addict son Fisher had thrown a hookers-and-blow party at the Plaza in New York and one of his guests was Alberto Goroz. This was back in August. And a mic in one of the rooms picked up a really great piece of audio, which was Fisher telling the young billionaire that, per the Goroz’s request, the “Holman situation is covered. He definitely isn’t gonna get out before the election in November.”
“That sonofabitch Stormer!” Goroz complained. “He took all the money we laundered through the unions and NGOs, that bought his election, and now he won’t even take our calls.”
“Yeah, well,” said Fisher, “he’s gonna do what we tell him to do or else we can make all the trouble in the world for him. And besides, he knows that without Holman in the game there’s a lot better chance he won’t have to deal with Trumbull. He sure doesn’t want that.”
“We can’t have that,” Goroz said. “Everything Daddy built starts getting torn down if your father doesn’t win.”
Fisher laughed.
“Come on, dude. No chance of that. It’s in the bag.”
“Is your Dad even, y’know, all there?” Goroz asked, a little suspicious.
“He’s doing better than yours!” Fisher roared back, laughing. “Besides, he’s been doin’ debate prep all week and he’s rockin’ it. And I got him some of these really killer amphetamines. Basically like a medical grade crystal meth. He’s gonna be like he’s 30 years old out there.”
“OK, if you say so,” said Goroz.
The rest of the tape was tough to understand, because that’s when the two trans hookers Fisher had procured for the party came in, and … OK, I can’t even continue with this one. You get the picture.
Stormer initially brushed it off, claiming Pierce was pushing a conspiracy theory. That’s when Pierce played him the tape.
“Hey, wanna see the bank records?” Pierce asked, a big smile on his face.
Stormer shook his head.
“This cannot get out,” he told Pierce. “I don’t think you realize who you are…”
“Are you serious, man?” Pierce said, basically laughing in Stormer’s face. “I know you’ve never really done a whole lot of business in your life. It shows. See, it’s like this — when you don’t have much of anything to offer, you don’t really take a hard line in a negotiation. And all you have to offer is what I’m askin’ you to do.”
“We’ll nationalize the ports. We’ll put you out of the UK. We’ll raid your offices at 30 St Mary’s Axe.”
“Go ahead. Do your worst. Do you think that’ll make your political problems go away?”
“You won’t have a clean victory, Mr. Polk. This, I can assure you.”
“I’m OK with a dirty victory. That’s what we had this summer, and when it was over there was a brand new government in Venezuela.”
“That sounds like a threat. As though there is an assassin’s bullet aimed at…”
“Oh, calm down. I hardly need to do any of that. Those MP’s who put you in power? The ones in your party? Turns out they come pretty cheap. How do you feel about a snap election? Vote of no confidence?”
It’s funny, because for all the leverage Pierce had on Stormer, I’m pretty sure this one was a bluff. But it was the one which finally pushed him overboard.
Stormer went quiet. The fight came right out of him.
“So yeah. We want those charges dropped, and we want the royal pardon. We also want an apology to Mike’s family. You don’t have to make it to Mike, because he’s gonna be dead for at least a little bit longer.”
“Actually,” Mike piped up, “you can take care of the apology right here and right now. I’ll take it privately.”
Stormer just glared at him.
“Boy, he’s quiet,” said Pierce. “I wonder if Mary Rosebottom wouldn’t mind picking up where ol’ Piers here leaves off when he heads back to Westminster with his dick in his hand and all his troubles getting worse.”
“And when I head back to the States and start eating in restaurants,” Mike said.
“Oooh. There’s this Brazilian steakhouse that just opened where we’re gonna live,” I piped up. “Honey, don’t you love that Brazilian thing where you flip your card over and they bring you all the meat you can fit on your plate?”
“Rodizio,” said Mom. “That’s what they call it.”
“You know,” Emily said, “I’ve never been to a Brazilian place. Can’t wait to go to one!”
“On behalf of the Crown,” said Stormer, “I deeply apologize for your imprisonment. The CPS was overzealous in its efforts to maintain order.”
“Yeah, OK,” said Mike.
“Great!” Pierce said, downing his gimlet. “Who’s up for another round of these?”
“Me!” I said.
“Mine could use a little refreshing, too,” said Mike.
Emily and Mary declined.
“What say you, Piers?” Pierce said. “Oh, come on. It’s a tough negotiation, but we’re all friends now, right?”
Stormer gave a hangdog look, drained his glass and nodded.
I ducked out to tell Rochelle we needed another round minus two, and when I came back in, Pierce was really dropping the bomb on Stormer.
“Of course, you realize that after we’ve done this deal you’re finished, right? Totally kaput. Busto. You gotta resign.”
“No. You can’t order that of me.”
“Who’s ordering? I’m just saying that you’ll never survive this. Backing down off the prosecution, giving everybody a pardon and then Mike shows up alive? Psh. You’ll be the biggest joke in British politics since Chamberlain.”
“Well, Profumo,” Mike said.
“There, now that’s a good point,” said Pierce. “Really, resigning is the best way to save face. I’d say you really ought to do it in the next, oh, 48 hours.”
“Hold on,” said Stormer “Tomorrow is the Robby Thomason rally in front of my residence, and you’re saying I should resign while it’s going on?”
“Put it like this,” said Pierce. “Once that thing happens I think you’re just prolonging the inevitable. How many people do you think are gonna show up at that thing?”
“They’re talking about half a million,” said Mike.
“Right. Whole lotta folks. Might even be more. And everybody is saying it has to be peaceful. No violence. And no terrorism!”
Pierce was laughing at his own joke, which was only really funny for the different colors it was making Stormer.
Mike quietly turned on the “record” app on his phone.
“So do you want me to promise to resign here and now?” Stormer asked Pierce.
“Hey, you do what you want to do,” he said. “We’ve already agreed on the rest, right?”
“We have.”
“So yeah, I mean, if you want to agree to this as well, we’re good. I’m just saying, this is really the only thing left you can do. It’s either that or they’ll make sure you go out, y’know, less gracefully.
“Oh, and Piers? So you’ll know? If you try to back out on this deal you’re going to get replaced, and I guarantee your replacement will absolutely take it. They might be lefty hacks like you, but the fastest way to get your stink off of ‘em will be to take the deal you refused. At least by sticking to this you’ll go out having taken the noose off your folks’ necks.”
The second round of drinks came, and Stormer softly said “All right, then,” and accepted Pierce’s toast. “To a new and, umm, different future for each of us!” he said, lifting his glass.
Then Stormer downed his gimlet in one gulp and made for the door.
“Wait!” Pierce said. “Before you go, let’s all have a celebratory pic. Huh?”
He knocked on the door and Rochelle came in.
“Rochelle, come on. Take our picture, will you?”
And so she did, Stormer in the middle flanked by Pierce and Mike, with Mom to Pierce’s right and me to Mike’s left. Emily was to my left.
All of us were smiling. Stormer, not so much.
Jupiter, Florida, October 18, 2024
The advice Karen Lugowski, who was Mike’s lawyer in the States, had given was that he ought to hang out at Liberty Point for a while longer. He didn’t listen.
“I want to sleep in the big bedroom in that house in Jupiter,” he said.
It didn’t hurt that he called Ron DeSantis and told him he was going to become a Florida resident and he’d really appreciate it if he wouldn’t be extradited to Great Britain.
DeSantis laughed and said, “You can count on that. It’s like Patton said of MacAuliffe, ‘a man that eloquent must be saved.’”
I’m not sure Patton said that. I know George C. Scott said it playing Patton in the movie. But neither of us had a problem with what the governor said. And more importantly, we believed him.
It’s a pretty refreshing change when the guy in charge of a place isn’t out to get you. I never really understood that until I got together with Mike, and now it’s almost a central preoccupation of mine. I’m the one in our family who tries not to be political, but you know the old quote: you might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
The time I spent in Britain proved that to me. What can I say?
So we flew into North Palm Beach County Airport on Pierce’s new Gulfstream G700. It was Mike and me and Emily, who was going to rent a car and drive back to The Villages after seeing the new house.
Mike asked her if she didn’t want to stay around for a while. “Why?” she said. “I’m an eligible bachelorette, and I live in a wonderland of eligible men. I should get started on replacing George as soon as possible.”
She spent the night, and then she rented a car and went home. And that was actually pretty OK by us.
I love this house. I totally understand why Mike’s eyes got so big when Pierce said he was giving it to us for our wedding.
What else I love is us. We’re almost obnoxious. We’re literally the perfect couple. We finish each other’s sentences. It’s stupid. Someday fairly soon we’ll have kids, and in a few years they’ll be so grossed out at how in love their parents are. I mean, eventually it’ll settle in and we’ll calm down.
I guess.
But it’s like I said. We’re almost like a Romancing The Stone kind of thing. It’s a fire-tested marriage. War, prison, it doesn’t matter. Throw anything you want at us; it’ll only make us closer.
Which brings me to my Dad.
Wait, no. First, I need to tell you about London. And this is so great.
So Pierce rented out a half-dozen of those video trucks, the ones which have video screens mounted in the beds that they normally use to show ads as they drive around. And Robby Thomason’s guys rigged them with big speakers, and then parked them strategically around the area where the Number 10 Downing Street protest was going to be. And those trucks were showing For England videos and a couple of the speeches the protest leaders were giving.
They had, according to the estimate Sky News gave based on their helicopter footage, around 750,000 people at that protest.
And when Mike showed up on the video feed, holding up a print copy of the front page of the BBC’s web site, so everybody knew he was alive, on the video screens on those trucks, the crowd went ballistic.
That was really, really cool to watch on Sky News’ live feed.
“My friends,” he said, “I just want to say it’s a real, serious pleasure to speak to you here today. For obvious reasons. It’s a pleasure to speak to anybody at this point. And I want to tell you that I salute you for coming out and fighting for your country.
“I’ve spent half a lifetime in conversations with people about what it means to live in a free country, and what I can say I’ve learned is that there are lots of people, no matter how much you try to teach them otherwise, who will choose power over freedom. Those are the people you have to guard against.
“You’ve got people like that in the wrong places in your country. You aren’t alone. There are lots of countries who have allowed that to happen. Mine included. Maybe we’ll fix that soon. And maybe you will, too.
“But just know that this current situation in the world won’t sustain itself. It can’t. Everything is going to change, and soon. I know, because I’m involved in an effort to make that happen. We’ll have more to say about that in the coming days. But in the meantime, have a great time today, and stay peaceful. Don’t give that government any justification for doing what they want to do to you.”
And nobody did. It was the biggest, and most orderly, demonstration the UK had ever seen.
And yes, Stormer resigned the next day. Labour couldn’t put a government together with him out of power, and a snap election was called. There’s a real chance Neville might come out of nowhere to be the UK’s next prime minister.
Mike did get his pardon from the King, by the way. It came FedEx on a piece of parchment paper, and he’s got it hanging in his office.
And where it hangs is over the couch.
Yes, it’s the couch from that house in London. Roman got it shipped to Jupiter along with the two matching chairs, which now sit opposite Mike’s desk. Mike and I fight over that couch; he likes setting up on it and working on his laptop, and I keep demanding that he work in his desk chair so I can lay on the couch.
If that’s all we fight over, I think we’re doing OK.
Oh, right. Dad.
So just before we got on the plane from Liberty Point to North Palm Beach, Pierce’s other jet landed, and on it was my youngest brother, Hank. He had asked Pierce if he could come to see him, because he was with a group of guys who had put an app together. It was called RKtech, and it let people input a GPS location and design a house on it based on satellite imagery of the lot and an almost-infinite bunch of choices of preloaded elements, complete with AI suggestions the app’s algorithms would put together.
I said Hank was eventually going to become a Silicon Valley tech bro. I was wrong. He said his group was out of Austin and that’s where he was moving.
I asked him if he was trying to get Pierce to bankroll the app.
“I think we’ve got that covered,” he said. “But I want to get us locked in with Sentinel Construction, because with what we understand they’ve done here at Liberty Point they can build a house for a fraction of what everybody else can with the same quality. If we sell this app to them, it could completely upend the housing market.”
“That might be an idea,” Mike said. “Good luck with that.”
The last I heard, Hank’s meeting with Pierce went pretty well.
Dad had texted me a few times. I wasn’t going to answer them. Mom was still in Liberty Point, and she wouldn’t stop with the phone calls telling me how awesome it was down there.
There’s a guy down there named Hal Gibson who you’ve probably heard of; he’s a former Marine Colonel who retired from the Corps when they tried to force him to take the COVID vaccine and he was the head of Pierce’s force who fought off the Venezuelans; anyway, Mom met Gibson and I think they hit it off.
But she maintains she’ll never leave Dad. I took the position that (1) it’s none of my business, and (2) I just want her happy. She deserves that.
Anyway, my phone rang, it was Dad, and I was swimming the last of my 20 laps in our little pool. Mike answered it, and I have no idea what they talked about but Mike had him on speaker when I got out and made my way into the den with a towel around my waist.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Peter,” said Mike, ‘I’ve finally got your daughter here.”
“Oh, good,” he said, as I sat in Mike’s lap. “Pauline, I just want to say something to you, which is that I recognize I didn’t handle any of this with your … marriage and … what happened afterward, very well.”
“A master of understatement, you are,” I said, and Mike lightly slapped my thigh.
Be nice, he whispered.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry,” said The Great Peter Chang.
“How much of this is because Farris is down five points in the polls and that sex tape of hers is making its way through OnlyFans?” I asked.
“PJ,” Mike said under his breath. “Come on. Give the guy a chance.”
“What’s most important is family,” said The Great Peter Chang. “I see that now.”
“Well, good,” I said. “Have you talked to Mom?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“We have a lot to work out. But I’m committed to it. You know me; I’ll adapt as I have to.”
“I know, Dad,” I said. “Good luck with that.”
Then I hung up the phone.
I’ll eventually get around to a full reconciliation with him. I’m not going to hate him forever, and Mike won’t allow it in any event. But I’m not ready yet.
Meanwhile, Mike tells me his career as a podcaster and web publisher is coming to an end. Holman Media is in good hands, and he says running this Polk Global Freedom Initiative, and its billion-dollar annual budget, is what he wants to do.
I can see why he’d say that. And I’m so proud of him I can’t stand it.
