Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, King of the Jungle, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator in 10 episodes each weekend in February, March, and early April, before its full publication on Amazon later this spring.

In the first two episodes, available here and here, our narrator, journalist Mike Holman, has traveled to a surprisingly lavish little city under construction in the jungles of Guyana that his old college roommate, billionaire industrialist Pierce Polk, is building as a retreat from a world slowly going insane.

Polk is confident that rumblings of a Venezuelan invasion of his jungle paradise are unfounded.

April 16, 2024, Atlanta, Georgia  

“Hello America, and welcome to Episode 334 of Connected, With Mike Holman. In this edition of the podcast, we’ve got one of the most interesting people in the world, talking about things of interest to the world. Pierce Polk, CEO of Sentinel Holdings, has just announced plans to launch a wireless internet consumer service early next year with coverage all over North America, and no sooner was that announcement made but the opposition spiked immediately. Calls for an investigation into Sentinel issued forth from several quarters, including the Department of Justice. A letter from Garrick Wreath, the attorney general, claims that Sentinel is engaging in “hegemonic” business practices and decries the “dangerous trend” of “hyper-vertical integration” that Sentinel’s plan represents.

“But that’s not all which is happening in the world of Sentinel Holdings. The FBI announced an investigation into Sentinel Port Management, alleging in leaked documents that its operations in Victoria, Texas and Hueneme, California are fronts for the global drug trade. Mr. Polk has denied this, and he has offered $100,000 to anyone who can provide definitive proof that drug trafficking is ongoing with participation of assent of Sentinel employees at any of the company’s 31 U.S. facilities.

“Legacy corporate media outlets are now calling Pierce Polk an ‘embattled’ CEO. But if he’s embattled, he’s battling. He’s got a lot to say and a clear desire to say it, so it’s a pleasure to welcome to the show Mr. Pierce Polk. Pierce, thanks for stopping in. Which one of these kerfuffles do you want to start with?”

Pierce gave me a perturbed look, not that I cared. I’d told him that the podcast wasn’t the best idea and that I wasn’t going to use my show as a vehicle to give him a hummer. I made it clear, or at least I thought I did, that if he was coming on the show, I wouldn’t be hostile — but I also wasn’t going to bury him in cream puffs, either.

The thing was, we didn’t do much show-prep. He just told me that he thought it would be a good idea if we did a podcast to talk about the things Sentinel had going on that were in the news. I went into the podcast largely blind as to what he had to say, which pissed me off. I’m big on preparation, and I’m in control of my show. That’s how I work. All of a sudden, I was part of Pierce’s cult, like I’d been afraid of, and I was reduced to the status of a spectator, essentially, on my own program.

Obviously, the guy you interview is going to drive the conversation a little. This was going to be more than that.

So yeah — I waylaid him with the open. Tough shit if you don’t like that, Pierce.

And when he saw that I didn’t melt from the stink-eye he gave me, Pierce immediately snapped out of his irritation and went into Charming Cult-Leader mode.

“Mike, it’s a great pleasure to be with you, and let me say that America desperately needs more Mike Holmans who actually do their jobs in media. The legacy press that you referenced is full of political operatives disguised as reporters, and most of them don’t even know what journalism is. So, thank you for what you do.”

“Appreciated, sir. Is there any truth to the allegations about the ports?”

“No. in fact, we’re going to release, as soon as we can and as soon as some legal protections are established for the sources of our information, several documents which prove the origin of this so-called investigation. It didn’t come from FBI field offices in Texas or California or anywhere else, and not even from the FBI at all. Instead, it came from the White House.”

“Well, that’s an allegation.”

“You bet it is. And it’s by no means all I’ve got. Mike, you’ve reported on your show and website for several years just how radical and corrupt this government is, and you’ve inspired me to do my own work. We at Sentinel have been in the network and private security business for a long time and as such we have investigative resources of our own. We’ve begun to marshal those and look into corruption at the highest levels on down, and today will be the first of many disclosures that will shock the American public.”

“It seems like this might be one of our most-watched episodes.”

“I would hope so, because the American people really need to know just how bad things are.”

“Before we get to that, we should talk about the wireless internet project and the Deadhorse administration’s threats to that business expansion. What about Attorney General Wreath’s letter?”

“I was amazed to see that, Mike. After all, this attorney general and this administration, and the previous one of the same party that this administration is the rump end of, had absolutely no problem with one Big Tech company after another vertically integrating themselves. Or horizontally integrating, which is even worse. They allowed Silicon Valley to turn into a very tight oligarchy, especially in the consumer marketplace, and they’ve done nothing as the cable companies and cell providers have built, essentially, monopolies in all the markets in America for internet service.

“So along we come — and by the way, this would really be our first foray into the consumer market for anything, because most of what we do has always been business-to-business — and now he’s concerned. Why? Because Garrick Wreath made millions of dollars doing work as a lawyer and lobbyist for the cell phone companies, owns a whole lot of stock in two of them…”

“Yes, but that stock is held in a blind trust,” I interjected, trying to keep it fair. Wreath, like all of the political hacks in this administration and lots of others, hid behind that cover story as they profiteered from their positions. But on this one, I knew what was coming. I was like John Stockton feeding Karl Malone for a one-hand jam.

“Oh, right. A blind trust. And the administrator of that trust is Excelsior Capital Management, the CEO of which is Keith Bradbury, who is Wreath’s brother-in-law.”

“Whoops!” I said.

“Right, exactly. Whoops. Here’s the problem with Garrick Wreath, and it’s a lot worse than his crooked attacks on our proposed expansion. We’ve been looking into something that had gotten a lot of viral traffic on social media, at least for a little while before it was suppressed on Facebook and YouTube and a few other places. Namely, that there’s a ring of child predators operating in New York and DC who engage in human trafficking and sex slavery.”

“But those allegations were supposedly debunked.”

“Were they? There were elements of them which were clearly untrue, but the ‘debunking’ was more like suppression and hope they would go away. Well, our team decided to do some real digging, and that’s when we found a 14-year-old named, well, I’ll call him Pedro.”

“This is something new.”

“Yes, it is, Mike. Pedro comes from a country in Central America, and he was trafficked across the border as an 11-year-old. First year of the current administration, when the border was thrown open. The coyotes took him to Piedras Negras in Mexico, across the river from Eagle Pass, Texas, and sent him to cross the Rio Grande into the hands of the border patrol. And from there, our own government transported him to ‘relatives’ who lived in Hyattsville, Maryland.”

“I take it those relatives weren’t really relatives,” I said.

“No, Mike, they weren’t. Instead, these were people working for the Mexican cartels who handled kids being trafficked. And in Pedro’s case he was taken to a house in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was then abused in ways I won’t describe by people who, he says, paid a lot of money for that sick privilege.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yes, it is. And a couple of weeks ago Pedro managed to escape from that house and by a spot of luck he saw a flyer our team put up on a telephone pole giving a number that runaways and kids being trafficked could call for help. That’s part of Operation Lifeline, a nonprofit we founded a few years ago which has delivered hundreds of kids who’ve been trafficked back to their families all over the world.”

The website and phone number for Operation Lifeline appeared on the bottom of the screen.

“Anyway, Pedro called the number and said he’d been held by bad people and he was afraid to call the police because he believed the cops were compromised, and he asked if we could help him. So we did. And Pedro identified the house in Bethesda where he’d been subjected to the most disgusting abuse known to man.”

“I haven’t heard about a raid on that house or any arrests made in the legacy media.”

“Neither have I, which is one reason I’m here. While we were waiting for the FBI or state or local police to do something about that house and what was happening there, we had a crew surveilling it from the street and overhead. And we watched as it was cleared out of all the people and stuff that was in there.”

“That’s disconcerting.”

“What’s more disconcerting is that we looked into the ownership of that house. We thought it was unusual that the house was owned by a small real estate investment trust, a company with a very uncommon investment profile. All it owns is large single-family houses in declining neighborhoods of cities around the country, places with six and seven bedrooms, lots of trees on the property, and garages. Always garages.”

“Potential houses of ill repute, you’re saying?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying … just yet. We’re investigating dozens of these places, but we’re trying not to burn the evidence like we might have done in Bethesda.”

“But I take it you do have something on that REIT.”

“I do. It’s a privately held entity, but among the listed investors in the initial paperwork filed with the state of Delaware 17 years ago is … one Garrick Wreath, now Attorney General of the United States of America.”

That wasn’t all Polk had to say. He then said he had written proof that the Vice President had taken a bribe from a Mexican cartel kingpin, and that the Federal Reserve was deliberately devaluing the currency.

Then at the end of the podcast he made a confession — that Sentinel’s announced move into consumer wifi was a bluff to smoke out Wreath.

“We have the capability to offer that service,” he said, “but we’re not doing it yet. We need an entirely different regulatory environment so that a company like ours could compete in a free market rather than this rigged system we’re currently in. But when we do enter that market, we’ll cut people’s monthly internet service costs by 50 percent.

“But I do thank the Attorney General for taking the bait. He can’t say that I started this fight. That’s on him, not me. He should know that he’s not beating me, though, not when he’s coming from so weak a position as he is.”

No sooner was the show uploaded to YouTube but it immediately came down. It didn’t matter. That podcast set a record for downloads on Rumble, and within two days it was over 100 million views on X, a number that had doubled a week later.

Congress called for hearings, the police raided that house in Bethesda and found nothing, of course, there was a smattering of calls for Wreath’s resignation in the legacy media. Conservative media went ballistic, as it often does, but anyone who was looking for this to provide some collapse within the administration was going to be disappointed.

Four days later Joe Deadhorse’s approval rating in a new national poll ticked down from 37 percent to 35.

And the day after that, the FBI, NYPD and the New York State Police raided the corporate headquarters of Sentinel Port Management in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, pursuant to separate warrants issued by judges from the Southern District of New York and The Criminal Court of the City of New York.

They found the offices empty.

April 19, 2024, Los Claritas, Bolivar, Venezuela  

“Here they come,” said Xing, from behind his binoculars.

“It’s certainly about time,” said Carvajal, who Cabrillo had noticed was less and less successful in his efforts to hide his contempt for the Chinese emissary.

This was a failing of the diminutive major, Cabrillo was aware, but on the other hand he couldn’t quite fault Carvajal’s dismay at their situation. Their effort at preparation for an invasion of the wilderness to the east was increasingly dependent on foreign assets.

The Chinese were suddenly everywhere in Venezuela.

This was something the Madiera regime had resisted for years, while other countries were embracing things like the Belt and Road Initiative and other “cooperative agreements” with the Chinese Communist Party.

Cabrillo had seen what China could do. Would do.

There would be investment. The Chinese would send in engineers and workers, and they would open a mine or a quarry or some other facility drawing raw materials from the earth. Here and there, the local citizenry might make a few dollars, pesos or dinars off the trade, but in the main, those materials — the lithium, the diamonds, the oil, the cobalt, etc. — would make their way onto ships bound for Shanghai or Quanzhou where their products would be turned into all kinds of consumer goods.

Or weapons. Or whatever.

Cabrillo didn’t pretend to know much of commerce. He was a military man, as three generations of his family before him had been. His father had been a colonel in the Castro regime and had fought for la revolucion in Angola and Nicaragua, which had earned him a villa near the beach in Playa Larga. And his grandfather had been a general — but not for Castro, at least not initially. The old man had been with Bautista and had fought against the communists. He stayed until the end and was captured. After three years in the prisons, several times nearly personally executed by Che Guevara, Eladio Jorge Cabrillo had been brought to see Fidel Castro himself, who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“You will join us,” Castro said, “and you will see your wife alive. If you do not, you will see her die. And your children, too.”

Eladio had then agreed to rejoin the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, which is what the regime was then calling the Cuban army. He was never treated without suspicion, but the Castros found themselves with so few competent military commanders that they tolerated Eladio nonetheless. And eventually, the Cabrillos became communists.

Manuel was a communist, but as he would joke among his friends, he wasn’t very good at it. Manuel actually liked the idea of private property, and when he wasn’t here in Venezuela commanding a brigade of peasants and Amerindians, he was busily burnishing his “bug-out bag,” as the Americans called it.

Or as best he could, given his less-than-perfect command of the free market system.

His wife Esmerelda, who he’d brought to Venezuela from Havana and stashed in an apartment in a well-secured area of Maracaibo, was a much more accomplished entrepreneur. She managed his properties. There were apartment buildings, sugar plantations, a small shipping company which did a brisk little business moving certain agricultural products from the Colombian hinterlands to Merida, on their way north, and a few other investments, most of which were managed out of a financial institution in the Cayman Islands.

It was cheap to conduct business in Venezuela, if you had the right stroke within the regime. Which Cabrillo did.

But Madiera was putting much of that at risk with his foreign ambitions.

It wasn’t that the mission Cabrillo was training the men for was particularly problematic. The Guyanese had no military to speak of; their official force strength was just under five thousand men. Cabrillo had that many in his brigade alone, and there were two others just like it in the Venezuelan army’s Jungle Infantry Division.

He didn’t know if the others were any better prepared for offensive action than his was, and frankly, he wasn’t all that confident in the 53^rd.

But against a lightly populated nation of farmers, miners and fishermen, most of whom barely had pistols and other small arms much less any real military hardware? This was not a difficult mission.

They would conquer the area to the west of the Essequibo River, which the Venezuelans had claimed as their own for hundreds of years. The Madiera government had renewed an old complaint that in 1899, when the border between the two countries had been settled by a commission of British, American and Russian diplomats, with the Americans representing the Venezuelans owing to a lack of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and the UK at the time, what resulted was a corrupt bargain due to an American sellout.

Cabrillo figured that argument was probably correct. His experience and indoctrination had it that the U.S.A. was always engaged in some manner or other of depriving the people of Latin America of their due. But he also knew that most of the world wasn’t all that interested in the claims of the Madiera regime of Venezuela.

And when the regime, the previous December, had staged a national referendum on annexing Essequibo pursuant to its age-old complaint, the planning of the Jungle Infantry’s mission had begun, which led Cabrillo to Las Claritas.

Given no outside interference, that mission was clearly destined to succeed.

And while Cabrillo’s assessment of the American administration, headed — at least nominally — by the deranged old man Joe Deadhorse, was that it was utterly paralyzed by a lack of leadership or even any conviction over its own national interests, he was nonetheless a bit worried that their adventure to the east would bring the Americans into a war. And if the Americans came into the theater, he’d need an elite force just to survive.

Which he most certainly did not have. He knew he was right to be worried about that.

Carvajal was more than worried. He wouldn’t shut up about it. Cabrillo had told him to stop his whining several times, but the little major had confined his complaints to their private conversations and never expressed doubts about the mission to the men. Like always, he’d stopped short of conduct Cabrillo could justifiably discipline; he had to give his adjutant room to privately express his judgment, or else he would be closing off a potential source of information and good advice.

And while he didn’t welcome Carvajal’s doubt-casting, none of it was ill-founded. The Guyanese they would sweep aside easily; any other force in their path, whether it was American, British (a possibility), Jamaicans or Dominicans if the Caribbean defense organization CARICOM got involved, or whoever else, and things could grow problematic very quickly.

Cabrillo found himself praying — a relic of his family’s pre-communist heritage — that their mission didn’t bring them in conflict with the Americans or others.

And if as to represent a sideways answer to those prayers, the Chinese continued to arrive with gifts for the 53^rd Jungle Infantry Brigade.

Today, those gifts were to include two dozen Harbin Z-9 helicopters capable of transporting 10 soldiers each.

Xing, the sweaty apparatchik who styled himself a military adviser though he appeared to be nothing of the sort and decked himself out in a trilby hat and a gray seersucker suit rather than fatigues, was cackling into his binoculars as the choppers noisily made their way into Las Claritas.

“They’re nearly here. Aren’t they beautiful?” he exclaimed.

“They’re fine,” said Carvajal, who was looking at the approaching choppers through his own binoculars.

“These will put your men in position to secure town after town when the signal is given,” Xing beamed. “And then our cooperation may truly begin.”

Cabrillo rolled his eyes.

Three days before, there had been a food riot in El Dorado, about 45 minutes up the road to the north, and he’d had to send some of his men there to suppress it.

Cabrillo knew that Venezuela was in no position to start a war with anyone. He also knew that the Chinese were perfectly well aware of that fact and happy to take advantage of it.

Those Harbin Z-9’s were only part of the shower of military assistance the Chinese were dumping not just on the 53^rd but all the elements of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces. Cabrillo also knew that Xing wasn’t there so much to supervise that assistance but also to direct their progress when he saw fit to do so. Cabrillo had been informed of that very thing in a communique from headquarters.

What he hadn’t been informed of was exactly who Xing was. Was he with the People’s Liberation Army? The Ministry of State Security? He didn’t think it was the latter. He’d thought to ask, but had stopped short. Cabrillo’s experience and training told him that curiosity was not a virtue.

Xing was Xing. If the powers that be wanted him to know more, they’d tell him.

He didn’t like any of it, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

But something else troubled him. The 53rd was building up quite a store of ammunition and supplies while the locals found themselves more and more desperate. Cabrillo’s quartermasters were under orders to stock up on all manner of foodstuffs and other supplies which might be useful to sustain a military occupation of the Guyanese hinterlands to the east, but he knew that was inherently problematic when the locals were suffering deprivation. He expected that ultimately his men would be living off the land — and that meant living off the locals in ways that big stacks of Bolívar Soberanos, suspect value that those already carried, wouldn’t suffice to facilitate. There had already been incidents; three days before, some of the men had shot a cow which was loose in the jungle and brought the carcass back to the base for butchering — only to endure a lengthy harangue from a local farmer with what amounted to an angry posse armed with machetes, pitchforks and a few pistols standing behind him.

It was a scenario which held the prospect of a major incident, not to mention a major setback in the training of his troops. Cabrillo, arriving quickly to the scene, had managed to placate the farmer with a stack of Bolivars and the promise of a new cow, which he was able to procure from a ranch in Brazil thanks to a regime contact in Caracas who had talents in such acquisitions. But it struck him that his men were the best-fed and certainly best-armed of all the occupants of this far southeast corner of Venezuela and the locals still showed up ready for blood if satisfaction wasn’t at hand.

That wasn’t a good sign. He knew that, while he wasn’t in charge of the timeline, the best thing that could happen was to get orders sooner rather than later for moving his men out of Las Claritas and into Guyana.

And for taking whatever they could off the people of Essequibo.

Xing’s choppers landed, and Cabrillo halfheartedly participated in the ceremony which ensued thanking the Chinese for supplying such a gracious bounty. When it was over, he and Carvajal reconvened in the small trailer that was brigade headquarters. They found Xing already there, boots off, stretched out on the little couch watching the large flat-screen TV along the far wall. Xing had sneaked away while Cabrillo was attempting to communicate with the Chinese chopper pilots, who left in a bus after officially turning the helicopters over to Venezuelans from the Army Aviation Command’s helicopter battalion.

Cabrillo had noticed that. Even before Carvajal had griped about it. He thought to upbraid Carvajal for his complaints, but again checked himself; while listening to his adjutant protest about Xing was unpleasant, it was nonetheless a reasonably accurate summation of their situation.

“We’re an extension of the Chinese Army,” Carvajal groused quietly. “We’re an instrument of our country becoming their colony.”

“Oh, stop moaning like an old woman,” Cabrillo said halfheartedly. “Without the Chinese we would be short of every necessity. Instead, we could support a force 30 percent greater than our present size.”

“That might be true,” said Carvajal, “but the question is whether Venezuela actually profits from this operation, or does that honor go to our oriental friends?”

“Excellent question,” Cabrillo said cheerfully. “Does it really matter at the end of the day? Your orders are still your orders.”

Carvajal was starting to respond, but then he stopped himself.

“What?” asked Cabrillo.

“I think if the men are asked to brutalize the Guyanese, they will refuse,” he said. “Especially if they believe this is all for the benefit of Xing and his friends.”

“Whose friends?” asked Xing, missing most of the conversation amid the TV show he was watching intently.

“Nothing,” said Carvajal.

“I’m very interested in the Z-9,” Cabrillo interjected, trying not to ruin Carvajal’s career.

“What are you watching?” Carvajal blurted out as he noticed something disturbing on the screen Xing’s eyes were glued to.

Cabrillo saw it as well and did a double take.

“It’s SuperLolita,” said Xing. “The latest from our American friends.”

Cabrillo had heard of the show. It was a controversial offering from the giant U.S. media conglomerate XYZ/Sidney which had appeared on its streaming platform SidneyAlso.

SuperLolita was a comic book made into a TV series, though Cabrillo had no idea if it was ever actually a comic book. The gist of the show, as he understood it, was that the main character was an early teen Latino trans-woman street hooker with super powers who fought for social justice on behalf of the LGBTQIA+ community, the differently abled and the undocumented migrants of inner-city Houston. She, or at least it was Cabrillo’s understanding that SuperLolita was to be referred to as a she, had two super powers: the ability to hear conversations even through brick walls from 1000 yards away, and the ability to shoot deadly laser beams from her nipples.

Glancing at the screen, Cabrillo saw that the latter power was real as SuperLolita pulled down her tube-top and let forth a pair of considerable beams of light which destroyed a police car. Xing bellowed a laugh, followed by several words of indecipherable Mandarin.

“Why would you be interested in this filth?” Carvajal asked the Chinese emissary.

“To watch the Americans destroy their own culture without help?” Xing responded. “How can you not be entertained?”

Carvajal looked at Cabrillo.

“He isn’t wrong,” Cabrillo said.

“You don’t find it depressing?”

“I have nothing to do with it. If they want to destroy themselves, it isn’t my problem. The mission is.”

Xing was cackling loudly as SuperLolita was climbing on top of a burly white policeman as he crawled away from the burning cruiser.

“You gonna learn to respect the new trans matriarchy, sugar,” she was telling the terrified cop.

“Yes, ma’am,” the suddenly subservient cop said, as SuperLolita took his handcuffs from his belt and clasped them around his wrists.

“This is filth,” Carvajal said.

“I don’t understand the casting,” Cabrillo noted.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Xing.

“First, the actress is not a Latina.”

“Amy Nguyen is excellent,” Xing said. “She’s very popular in China. Half-black, half-Vietnamese. Very exotic.”

“And a man,” Carvajal said. “She has a beard.”

“Enough of this,” said Cabrillo. “It’s time to go over the order of deployment so that we can calibrate the mission preparations.”

Xing sighed and pressed the “pause” button on the remote control just as SuperLolita was crushing the policeman’s hand under a spike heel. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go over this again.”

A map of southeastern Venezuela and central Essequibo, the area of the 53^rd’s planned operations, was laid out on a cheap card table. Cabrillo approached it with Carvajal and Xing in tow.

“Now,” he said, “the first wave will go out as follows: nine helicopters straight to Kaietur Falls, and three each to capture the towns of Ekereku, Paruima Mission, Waramadan, Opadai, and Kamuda Village.”

“Yes,” said Xing, a mild exasperation in his voice, “we’ve been over this.”

“And then we will be joined by a second wave of helicopters, so that we will then send 10 of them to the next target, which is Mahdia, plus two each to the secondary targets Ajimpepai, Kwiokrebaru, Isseneru Village, Assura Village, Pipillapai, Opadai and Kokadai.”

“These places are so small it’s hardly worth it to spend the gas,” Xing muttered.

Cabrillo gave him a sideways look, irritated that the interloper would carp about his plan. If executed correctly he would effectively occupy what points of communication and transportation existed in his area of operation within a couple of hours of the opening of hostilities. And what did Xing know about it?

“And then the major target,” said Carvajal.

“That’s correct,” Cabrillo said, looking defiantly at their Chinese guest. “The American settlement at Liberty Point.”

April 27, 2024: New York, New York

I was in Manhattan for a meeting with ClearHeart Broadcasting, a big corporate radio company that I’d flirted with for years over the idea of doing a daily syndicated radio show, when one of their suits stormed into the conference room.

“You guys have to see this! Turn on ANN!”

So we did, and there was a breaking news report about a massive cyberattack that had taken down the servers for all of New York’s state government and for New York City as well.

Both of them had made a large show of firing Sentinel Security as their firewall provider in what was essentially a political retaliation for Pierce evacuating the company headquarters. But they obviously hadn’t done much preparation for the change, and the guy who’d been in charge of the New York state server had made a very public resignation.

It was gorgeous, actually. What he’d said was that DEI and wokeness doesn’t build a bridge, fly a plane or run a firewall, and he’d put up with a lot over the last few years, but he’d never seen anything like the attempt to cancel Sentinel over politics.

His name was Aidan Park Hoo, and we had him on the Connected podcast the next day. He was a geek’s geek, but a hell of an interview. When I asked him what he was going to do next, he said he was thinking about buying a cabin in the hills.

“There’s a lot of that going around,” I said.

“Well, yeah. Just pay attention! Lunatics are running everything. And they definitely don’t listen to advice. All you can do is try to get away from them.”

That same day, Deadhorse gave a speech at an assisted living facility in Arizona where he’d attempted to attack Pierce as an outlaw, but he ran off script and got him confused with Ross Perot. That after letting it slip that the Justice Department had been “secretly investigating” Sentinel for months.

It was awful and hilarious at the same time, but the upshot of it was that before the end of the news cycle the New York state legislature passed a bunch of changes to its criminal fraud statute that were clearly aimed at Pierce.

That night the cable news shows were full of lawyers arguing over what the state legislature in New York had done. The public hadn’t heard terms like “bill of attainder” and “ex post facto law” in a long time, but that had changed.

Pierce sent me a text message letting me know that there would be a big party in Georgetown soon. I knew he meant the one in Guyana, not the one in DC.

And the meeting with ClearHeart was largely a waste of time.

The thing was, I didn’t really want to deal with all the time a daily radio show would take up. Between the two hours in the evening ClearHeart was pitching, and the show prep time before that, it was going to be a monopolization of my schedule. But the big sticking point was that they were insisting on gobbling up the podcast for their own app, and that would have largely been the end of Holman Media.

I would have considered it had I not done the deal with Pierce. In fact, the ClearHeart meeting was already scheduled when I made the deal with Pierce. But now that I had that deal and I was becoming the hottest thing in media — or something like that — I said I’d only consider it if there was a verifiable shit-ton of money on offer, and that had to be up-front money.

It wasn’t.

I had a cable network TV hit in a midtown studio that night, which was a debate with Juan Williams about the threat rogue billionaires presented. Williams blew a gasket at me when I noted that for all his complaints about Pierce, he’d never attempted to do anything damaging to the rest of us like pumping chemicals into the sky to deflect the sun’s rays, he wasn’t in the Epstein flight logs, he hadn’t tried to fix an election or censor anybody.

“Well, you work for him,” said Williams, “so of course you’d say that.”

“I’d say it regardless,” I shot back. “It’s the truth. Why aren’t you angry that a government full of political hacks is trying to destroy him simply for having a different opinion than you?”

“He’s destroying the economy! He’s putting his competitors out of business!”

“Really? Who? And how? And did you say this about Amazon and what they’ve done to Mom and Pop retail in America?”

Williams didn’t like that. The debate got nasty, and the host cut to a commercial break early and the segment ended.

Then as I was leaving the studio, I got a text from Kathleen Lemoine, Pierce’s personal assistant, letting me know a car was waiting to pick me up in the building’s garage and take me to Teterboro Airport where a jet was going to take me to Guyana. She said she’d have somebody check me out of my hotel and bring my bags.

“OK,” I texted back. This was probably better than having to get up at 4 AM to catch that Delta flight back to Hartsfield the next day.

I landed in Georgetown at 1 a.m. and a car was waiting for me at the airport. The guy driving it called himself Vinesh, and he spoke with an accent that sounded like he was from Calcutta.

“Are you one of the newly-arrived?” I asked him as he wheeled around onto a two-lane road leading out of the airport.

“No, sir,” said Vinesh. “My people have been here for two centuries.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Most of us in Guyana are descended from Indians brought here as indentured servants.”

“I see.”

“Most of the rest are of African descent. We were indentured to them.”

“Wait, the Africans were the landholders and you guys worked in their fields?”

“That’s correct.”

“How about that?”

“Now we run the country.”

I just nodded. I had a feeling this was going to turn into a lecture of some kind.

“Hey,” I said, “I heard your economy here grew like 60 percent last year. This place is booming, huh?”

“It is. But you can’t really tell. You can make more money now, but everything has become very, very expensive. When it isn’t bought up immediately.”

“I can imagine.”

“Guyana was always one of the more reasonable places to live. But now there are Americans, British and the Latins, and they are buying up everything. Pricing us out.”

“I would guess they’ll be putting up subdivisions and apartment buildings and so on.”

“Pierce Polk already is. You know him?”

“I do. He’s building things here in Georgetown?”

Vinesh nodded.

“Sentinel Construction is building a big place in Land of Canaan, which is south of Georgetown, for a headquarters. And they’re buying up land for, who knows?”

“That sounds like him. Always ahead of the game. I hear he’s building a mall around here somewhere.”

“I like him,” Vinesh said, nodding. “But he should stay in America, not have his jungle Shangri-la in Guyana.”

“Why so?”

“Because they will take it from him. It is too much, what he is trying to do.”

“He’d be a little dismayed to hear you say that. But I expected you were going to give me a Guyana-for-the-Guyanese speech.”

“No,” he said. “But this is South America. It isn’t like the United States where good things just naturally happen.”

“I hate to tell you, Vinesh, but most people in the States don’t think that’s true of the States anymore either.”

“I know. I have a nephew who lives in Baltimore.”

“Yikes. Baltimore?”

“The suburbs.”

“Right.”

Vinesh pulled us in front of a little boutique hotel along a big east-west drag of a road. The marquee said it was the Grand Coastal Hotel; it wasn’t all that grand, but it was tidy and had a little bit of a tropical-colonial vibe to it.

Once I was inside, a friendly rotund lady gave me an actual metal key to a room with a king-sized bed, and I didn’t even undress before I crashed.

The next morning when I checked my messages I saw that all hell had broken loose back home.

At a press conference in Manhattan, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced he’d secured an indictment of Pierce Polk and “twenty of his confederates” on a RICO beef. I wasn’t sure what the details were, but my attention was really piqued when he said that it was important that Polk be arrested seeing as though he was a flight risk.

Arrested? Guys like Pierce, you call his lawyer and negotiate a surrender. This clown was talking about sending feds out to get him like he was a drug dealer or a rapist.

I texted Pierce then, asking what the hell was happening. The response was a question: are you in Georgetown?

When I said yes, he told me to chill out and enjoy the pool, and he’d be down there later that day.

Of course, the hotel carried ANN, and of course, they were breathlessly following the Pierce Polk saga. There was a special graphic flashing on the screen about the “NATIONAL MANHUNT” for the “rogue billionaire,” and a few minutes later there was a correspondent in Dallas reporting that the U.S. Marshals had him trapped at Sentinel’s offices in Addison. But the Texas Department of Public Safety was also on the scene and there was something of a standoff. Sentinel’s people were heavily armed and refusing to allow the Marshals into the building. And Texas DPS was siding with Sentinel and not the Marshals.

There I was, texting Pierce asking what the hell was going on. “No big deal,” came the response.

And ANN’s cameras caught a helicopter taking off from the roof of the building. “He’s escaping!” cried the reporter. “They’re letting him get away!”

Melissa, my research assistant, called.

“I think you should come home,” she said. “As much as I like him, do you really want to be associated with Pierce Polk now?”

“I pretty much have to see this though at this point,” I said. “If nothing else it’s one of the biggest stories in modern journalism, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. If they let you tell it.”

“Hmmm.”

“What are you doing down there?”

“Right now? Answering emails in a hotel room. Maybe later I’ll go and hug a sloth.”

“Smart-ass,” she said. “Be careful.”

“Everything OK at the office?”

“Yeah. Colby is ecstatic. Site traffic is through the sky today. We’re live-blogging the Pierce Polk manhunt like everybody else is.”

“OK,” I said. “I have some sort of lunch meeting down here that I got a calendar invite for. I don’t know what it is.”

“Again, be careful.”

A little later on, there was a report that the Sentinel Holdings Gulfstream G700 jet was forced to land at Belle Chasse Naval Air Station south of New Orleans. Some press flack from DOJ was on TV bragging about how they were arresting Pierce. That was pretty impressive, I thought, considering that he was texting me with laughing emojis.

“You OK?” I replied.

“Fuckers got my jet,” came the response.

“Where are you?”

“I’ll be there in a couple of hours. We’re meeting with the PM.”

So that was my lunch meeting.

Vinesh brought the car to the front of the hotel, and now in the light of day we were following the main drag, which was the Rupert Craig Highway, westward into the downtown.

“I think you might be stuck with our friend from now on,” I said.

“Pierce Polk?” he asked.

“Yeah. Seems like they tried to arrest him in the States today and he decided he’d relocate to your fine country instead.”

Vinesh sighed and nodded.

A little later on, he put us in front of another hotel. This was the Marriott, and it backed up to the beach.

“Damn,” I said. “Wonder why they didn’t put me here.”

“Because there’s no room,” said Vinesh. “It’s booked weeks out.”

“Really?”

“It’s like I told you. Everything is expensive when you can even get it. Too many people here now.”

“Wow,” I said as I got out.

“I will wait for you,” said Vinesh.

Inside the hotel, a pretty black girl in a flowery pencil skirt met me and directed me to the presidential suite. She said her name was Mathilda and she was an assistant to the president — a guy by the name of Mahandas Ishgan.

“Your boss is already in with him,” she said. “His flight got in early.”