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 episode, available here, we met our narrator Mike Holman, a conservative journalist and podcaster with a small independent media company, and his old college roommate, the mega-successful industrialist Pierce Polk, one of the world’s richest — and most controversial — men. Polk has hired Holman to write his biography and invites him down to the jungle sanctuary he’s building along the Essequibo River in Guyana.

There are rumblings that the Venezuelans are preparing to annex the Essequibo region by force…

*****

April 5, 2024, Atlanta, Georgia

Megan came back just before the car showed up with a brand-new suitcase full of brand-new clothes and other brand-new gear.

“Throw that disgusting thing away,” she said, looking at my suitcase. “You don’t need it, or really anything you packed in it.”

“How much stuff did you get me, dear Megan?” I asked my ad sales manager, who was apparently now my personal quartermaster and purchasing agent.

“Enough,” she said. “Plus, you should put this on.”

She handed me a couple of plastic hangers holding a “river guide shirt” and a pair of “Jackson quick-dry pants” from Orvis. And a bag containing hiking boots, socks, and a rain jacket from Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

“A Hawaiian shirt and jeans? No, you may not.”

Just then Melissa, my research assistant, came in.

“I agree,” she said. “By the way, the car is here.”

“Sheesh. I thought I was the boss of this clownshow.”

“Hurry up,” said Megan. “Melissa, will you pack up his computer gear for him?”

“Yup,” she said, shooing me out of my chair.

A few minutes later, dressed like an Eddie Bauer model or something, and having waved goodbye to the staff, I was sitting in the back of a giant Suburban listening to Aaron Lewis belting out “Am I The Only One” — not my choice; that was what Raul, the driver, had on — as we fought our way south on I-285 on the way to Fulton County Airport.

“It’s probably longer as the crow flies,” he said, “and I know it’s bumper-to-bumper, but at least there’s no traffic lights. I hate the traffic lights.”

“I’m with you,” I nodded. “Besides, it’s Atlanta. There’s no escaping this traffic.”

“Am I the only one not brainwashed?” Aaron was asking on the stereo. “Makin’ my way through the land of the lost / Who still gives a shit / and worries ’bout his kids / As they try to undo all the things he did?”

“Hmmph,” I said.

“Music all right, Mr. Holman?” asked Raul. “I can put on something else.”

“Nah, Aaron’s fine,” I said. “Just thinking about those lyrics.”

“They’re true,” said Raul. “I think it’s lost. Just a matter of time.”

“You may be right. That’s a common feeling, I notice.”

“We’re run by freaks and psychos. You know it, Mr. Holman. I listen to your podcast. You had Riley Gaines on talking about los transgéneros. Taking over girls sports. I got a daughter; what am I supposed to tell her about that?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Raul. It’s stupid. Not like when we were growing up.”

“My parents grew up in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas,” he said. “My Papa won’t stop talking about how this country is just like that now. It freaks me out.”

“Yeah, not good.”

“You tell Mr. Polk that if he needs a driver down there I’ll go. I just want to bring my family.”

“Raul, I don’t think they have a lot of roads where he’s building his place.”

He laughed. “Good point. But there’s a lot of us who’d go with him.”

“You need to fight for this place, Raul. The country is only lost if you let it be.”

“I hope you’re right. You would know better than me. But it’s hard to keep faith. Did you hear what Deadhorse said this morning?”

“What, about how Catholics of all people ought to be for abortion?”

“Yeah. What the hell was that?”

“Raul, I have no earthly idea. I’m not even gonna try to analyze that one. But I’m almost positive that the Washington Post will explain it for us in tomorrow’s edition.”

“Freakin’ gibberish is what it is,” Raul said. “That’s all we hear. And I used to be a Democrat. Now I’m not anything. I can’t stand any of them.”

“You don’t like Trumbull?”

“Yeah, he’s OK. I’ll probably vote for him. But his party won’t even back him. Look at the ones here.”

“Also a good point,” I said, since the Georgia governor had a long-running feud with Trumbull for which both sides shared ample fault.

Finally, after 45 more minutes of Raul’s desperate harangues and a playlist of country songs featuring a lot of Oliver Anthony, Kid Rock, and Jason Aldean, we pulled up to Fulton County Airport, which was the private-jet venue of Pierce’s choice. Raul hustled the Suburban through the checkpoint and drove us right up to a big hangar. We got out, he grabbed my bags and I walked in…

…to find Pierce with a half-dozen other guys drinking beer.

“Hey, here he is!” said Pierce. “Mike, glad you could make it. Here, I want you to meet some of these folks. Guys, this is Mike Holman, my old college roommate. I’m assuming you know who he is. Mike, meet some of the folks who are making Liberty Point a reality.”

“Hey Pierce, hey everybody,” I said. “What’s Liberty Point, again?”

“Liberty Point is what we’re calling the little colony in the jungle,” said an older guy with a cowboy hat and iron handshake grip. “I’m Ted Kournis, project manager for Sentinel Construction. Liberty Point is my thing.”

I nodded, enduring that handshake until Kournis let go.

“And this is Bill Abbott,” said Pierce. “He’s the architect. Absolutely brilliant.”

“Nice to meet you, Bill,” I said.

“Likewise,” said Abbott, who came off as bookish until I noticed the tree-trunk forearms he had.

“That there is Roman Jefferson,” said Pierce, pointing to a bald-headed black guy with a badass look to him. “He’s a guest and a potential inhabitant.”

“Good to meet you, Mike,” said Jefferson. “I’m a fan.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “What line of work are you in?”

“Private security, mostly. Some other things.”

“Alright.”

“These two guys are Todd Allen and Chad Burkhardt,” Pierce said, pointing to a couple of bankers. “They’re bankers.”

“Guess that’s obvious,” said Allen, who had a pinstripe suit on. His handshake was like a pillow compared to Kournis’.

“And I think you already know Mark Smith,” said Pierce. “He’s building our IT setup down there.”

“What’s up, Mark?” I said. He’d gone to Vanderbilt, a couple of years behind us. Mark graduated at the same time we did. And he’d been with Pierce from the get-go.

“Long time,” he said. “Good to see you, Mike.”

“OK, guys, let’s get on this sucker and get moving. I’ve got lots of liquor and I think we have all kinds of snacks and there’s a chocolate cake and some other stuff…”

He droned on a while as we boarded.

Oh, and did I mention the plane was a Gulfstream G700? The most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. I made the mistake of complimenting Pierce on it, and before I knew it I was getting all the specifications. It would seat 18 and sleep 12. It’d do Mach 0.925, which was more than 700 miles an hour; its wingspan was 99 feet, 9 inches; and they’d had to build their own airstrip for it because the one at Mahdia, which was the closest town to Liberty Point, was only about half as long as they needed.

“This guy can make the trip down there and back and down again,” Pierce said. “Awesome range, right? We could go halfway around the world until we’d need a refuel.”

“It’s amazing, Pierce,” I said, half-exhausted from his dissertation. “Really. Some kind of beautiful plane.”

“Definitely nicer than that Bombardier Challenger 300 you used to have,” said Smith. “What a lemon that was.”

Pierce cocked his head and nodded. “At least I got a decent resale out of it.”

I looked at Roman, figuring that he and I were the two broke-dicks on this flight. Then I noticed his watch. It was a Cartier something-or-other, which had to be worth seven or eight grand.

Roman smiled. “You fly private much, Mike?” he asked.

“Not that often,” I said. “Business class is usually the top of my game.”

He chuckled. “I feel you.”

“Makes this a fun trip,” I said. “At least until we get there.”

A pair of stewardesses came aboard and saw a cocktail party going on, and after some scolding and cajoling and a dose or two of the kind of sexual innuendo that would make for a considerable legal problem but for the fact, as Pierce told me, that Stacey and Allie had heard it all before and had signed an NDA before coming aboard, we were all in our seats and the jet taxied out onto the runway.

And when the pilot punched it, in the blink of an eye we were airborne.

“Smooth,” I said to Pierce, who was seated next to me.

“Right?” he said. “Guys, Mike is comin’ out of an oath of poverty he took a bunch of years ago. We gotta get him acclimated to the big-time!”

“Hear, hear,” said Burkhardt, lifting a glass. He wasn’t drinking beer.

And before I knew it Pierce was handing me a glass of…

“It’s Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque 2002,” he said. “Only about 6,000 Euro a bottle.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“No big deal. It’s just sparkling wine. But these guys like it.”

I shook my head, but I joined in his toast, which was “to a new world in the new world.” And then as the other passengers commenced to their own conversations, Pierce started peppering me with details.

“So it’s a four and a half hour flight,” he said, “and then we’ll land at CPX. This will blow your mind.”

“What’s CPX?”

“That’s the airport code for Connor Polk Airfield.”

“You named it for your dad, huh?”

“He’s always been into aviation. I thought he’d get a kick out of it. Mom sure did.”

I nodded.

“Wait until you see Liberty Point,” he said. “It’s a bad-ass little place. It’s obviously not done, but we’ve got the main lodge finished, and we put together the hydro plant, the airport, the water treatment and the sewer system, and…”

“Pierce, how many people are you expecting this place to hold?”

“Well, we can house 2,300 now. Comfortably. In a month when the second phase is finished, it’ll be more like 4,000, maybe more if the weather cooperates. And in two months when the big condo buildings come online, that’ll be another 6,000 people.”

“Where are you going to get all these folks from?”

“Lots of Sentinel employees, mostly. But also, I’ve got some friends of mine who’ve bought in. It’s kind of a just-in-case thing for them, but they’re all making their way down to visit. You’ll see some pretty famous folks at dinner tonight.”

“Interesting.”

“OK, I’m overloading you. I get it. Hey, there’s a master bedroom back there. You want to rack out? You want me to send Stacey with you to tuck you in?”

“Tempting, Pierce. Really. But I’m good. I think I’m gonna work some more on my outline for the book. Got some ideas rolling around in my head that I want to put down.”

“Hey, great idea! So you’ll know, the wifi on this is like eight times faster than anywhere on the ground. Part of that is Gulfstream, and part of it is Mark’s wizardry.”

“Cool. Thanks!”

Then he left me alone for a while, and I got to work.

But before I knew it, Pierce was harassing me again.

“Hey,” he said, “you’re going to want to check something out. We’re coming up to the coast of South America, and we’re going to come in low and slow over Guyana because there’s something you’ll want to see.”

“All right,” I said. “What is it?”

“Only the tallest waterfall in the world. Come on!”

We were descending pretty rapidly, and I could tell the engines were powering down. The coast of Guyana was visible below in the fading daylight. I couldn’t see any evidence of civilization.

“Why’s the beach unpopulated?” I asked Pierce.

“The whole country’s unpopulated,” he said. “There’s like 800,000 people in all of Guyana. It’s pretty much one of the most unspoiled places in the world.”

“Until you came along to spoil it, right?”

“Yeah. Something like that. We’ll be landing right at sunset, so you won’t get to see the night-time view, but it’s one of the most amazing things — you can fly at 35,000 feet above the jungle and you won’t see any lights at all from the ground at night. Like nothing. Just a black void.”

“I hope that’s not supposed to make me more comfortable.”

Pierce laughed. “Hey, don’t worry about it. If we crash, it’s pretty much a done deal we’re all dead. Better if the impact kills us.”

“Hilarious, Pierce.”

“You and I aren’t meant to die in the jungle, buddy. Trust me.”

A little while later I could feel the jet making a sharp turn.

“Oh, here it is!” said Pierce with all the enthusiasm of a 10-year-old. “You’re not gonna believe this. OK, everybody, look out the right-side window!”

Just about everybody but me had their phones out, mashing them against the window as the plane tilted right.

Then I saw why. It was glorious.

“That’s Kaietur Falls,” said Pierce. “It’s a 750-foot drop, which is the biggest in the world. We’re not in the rainy season yet, so you’re not getting the full force of the water, but look at that!”

“I never heard of this thing,” I said. “It’s the tallest?”

“Yeah,” said Mark Smith. “It’s not the biggest waterfall in South America overall, that’s Iguazu Falls down in the three corners. But this’ll do.”

“That it will,” I said, as we banked around for another look.

“There’s a little airfield down there,” said Pierce. “I told them I’d pay to put down a runway big enough to land a jet like this, but for some reason there was resistance to that.”

“Probably because you’d put all the little plane operators who run tours in there out of business,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe so. But still — big hotel on the river at the top of the falls, cantilever deck so you could see the whole thing, somebody would make out like a bandit!”

“They don’t want it, Pierce.”

“They don’t know what they want. I guarantee you in five years somebody will build it. Guyana is exploding. Exoil found something like 12 billion barrels off the coast here and they’re pouring in the resources. Guyana’s GDP went up SIXTY percent last year, and it’s going to do probably better than that this year.”

“Jesus.”

“The place has gone from one of the poorer places on earth to, I think, fourth-richest country per capita in the Western Hemisphere in the space of a decade. All that wealth coming in means development. You know it, and I know it.”

“Guess that means Georgetown … it’s Georgetown, right? The capital?”

“Yeah.”

“Georgetown must be a happening kind of town right now.”

“Sort of. It’s a shithole of a place but it’s got lots of potential. We bought a port facility on the Demerara River close to its mouth, right by downtown. Servicing a lot of the offshore stuff. Running helicopters to the platforms and back. It’s pretty rich little business.”

“So you’re, what? The oligarch of this country?”

“A little. Mostly I just want to help. They have super-nice people here. Most of ‘em have no idea how to live in a rich country, but that’s actually part of the charm. They’re simple, but they’re buying BMWs and day-trading on the NASDAQ. There’s tons of inflation because it’s all so remote and they can’t buy enough stuff to satisfy all the money they’re making. So mostly everybody trades in dollars. We’re building a first-class mall next to the university in the capital.”

After we made a second pass over the falls, the jet turned southeast and then northeast, and in just a couple of minutes we were dropping down over a thick carpet of statuesque trees into a narrow fenced-off clearing and setting down onto a well-constructed runway. I could feel the brakes kicking in, and I must have shown some panic on my face, because Pierce laughed at me.

“No sweat, pal,” he said. “This runway is 8,000 feet. Plenty long enough.”

“I wouldn’t expect otherwise,” I said. “What are the fences for?”

“Keeping out the critters.”

“What critters?”

“Caiman. Capybaras. Anteaters. Jaguars.”

“Jaguars?”

“Oh, yeah. We have a couple of them who visit us from time to time. It’s why we have a couple of game wardens at Liberty Point.”

We taxied to a large hangar painted with the Sentinel logo, and the plane slowed to a stop inside.

And when the door opened, I expected a blast of steam to rush in. Instead, it was actually just a little on the warm side.

As we walked down the little stairway, I asked Pierce if this was normal.

“This time of year, it’ll get up to 90 degrees or so,” he said. “The low is 72.”

“Shit, that’s only a little hotter than back home. How are the summers?”

“This is about as hot as it gets, actually. What’s not good about the summers is the rain. You’ve never seen rain like this place gets.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh, yeah. Last June I think we got 14 inches in a month.”

“Good Lord.”

“Wasn’t easy on the construction, I’ll tell you that.”

A couple of Jeep Grand Cherokees pulled up, and we all piled in. We motored out of the hangar and onto a road that took us around the runway, up to an electronic gate that opened as we approached it, and into a dense forest down a hill.

“Damn,” I said, looking out of the side window. “It’s freaking dark out here.”

“Yeah,” Pierce said, as Kournis and Smith chuckled. “We haven’t installed the streetlights yet.”

“Very funny, Pierce.”

“No, we’ll put them in. When’s that scheduled, Ted?”

“Six weeks,” he said. “Need the power transmission lines first. Maybe sooner.”

“Well, wait — where does the power at the airstrip come from?”

“We’ve got a couple of diesel generators for that,” said Pierce. “But that’ll change when we hook the place up to the hydro plant on the Potaro.”

“The Potaro?”

“That’s the little river. It’s the one that big waterfall is on. Upstream from here.”

“What’s the big river?”

“That’d be the Essequibo. You’ll see that one in a minute when…”

Just then the road straightened and headed northeast, and we stopped at another gate. A wall of solid wood stood in our way.

“Looks like something out of Jurassic Park,” I said. “What’s on the other side?”

“Civilization,” said Kournis.

The gate opened and the road became a boulevard, and I broke out in a laugh.

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said.

A lot of it was under construction, and I could see there were people working, even now under project lights since the sun was down, but it looked as though I’d found my way to Florence. Or maybe Marseille.

“We decided on a Mediterranean feel,” said Abbott. “It sort of fit the territory, plus the local sources of building materials are a good match.”

“Great stone in the quarry on the other side of the Potaro,” said Pierce. “And we have great clay for mortar.”

“I’d have thought you’d use wood,” I said, “since there’s so much of it.”

“Nope,” said Abbott. “Wood attracts termites. And these termites are real sons of bitches.”

I chuckled and shook my head.

We made our way about a half-mile down the boulevard, and then the Cherokee made a right turn under an archway into a courtyard.

“Welcome to the lodge,” said Pierce. Everybody got out of the vehicle.

I could see what looked like an expensive restaurant on the ground floor to my right. The building surrounding us had three stories, and it was done in a renaissance Italian style with white sandstone walls.

I followed Pierce to a lobby-slash-concierge station in the corner of the building, where he was greeted by a pretty Latin girl as we passed through the door.

“Hey, Consuela,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Very well, sir,” said Consuela. “They’re waiting for you upstairs.”

“OK, great. Thanks.”

He led us to an elevator, and as we got to the third floor and the door opened, I got to see the Essequibo as I looked out of the window.

“Damn,” I said. “That’s a big freaking river.”

“It’s half as wide as the Mississippi,” said Kournis. “Flows at 200,000 cubic feet per second. Which is about a third of the Mississippi’s volume.”

“How navigable is it?” I asked.

“To here, pretty navigable,” said Abbott. “Boat comes with supplies a couple times a week.”

“Where does the boat come from?”

“Bartica, downriver,” said Pierce. “Hey, come this way.”

He opened a door, and inside was a penthouse suite–looking place that would put the Ritz to shame.

“Jesus, Pierce,” I said.

“This is really a temporary thing,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll show you where I’m going to build my place. It’s a little upriver from here, which means south of here. Decent-sized hill overlooking the town. Perfect for a villa!”

“And you’ll get to see the town,” said Kournis. “It’s growing fast.”

“How much is all of this going to cost?”

“Eight billion,” said Pierce. “Pretty cheap.”

“We’ll come in under budget,” Kournis said. “Not a lot of red tape down here.”

Pierce led us into the dining room. The other guests were already there. Among them: a couple of very recognizable singers, a retired Super Bowl–winning quarterback, the president of Lincoln Mining Company’s South American operations, the CEO of Magpul, and the former head of the Brexit Party in the U.K.

And we all sat down to dinner. Steak, obviously. That’s what you ate when you were at Pierce’s table.

April 8, 2024, Atlanta, Georgia  

I spent a weekend down at Liberty Point, and I don’t mind saying it — the place blew my mind.

It was basically a little village in the middle of a vast jungle, but they were building it as some sort of medieval/renaissance European city. They’d walled it off, though the walls were built to be temporary and modular — they’d move them when it was time to expand the place.

Wide streets, little courtyards in the middle of all the city blocks, all the buildings three stories high. Everything was stone and concrete, with those Italian-looking terra-cotta tile roofs. They were making the tiles on site with river clay from a quarry on the Potaro that Pierce had acquired. He had bought 20 square miles of property, and that included five or six quarries and mines, along the Potaro and Essequibo and heading inland.

He showed me the plans for Liberty Point on a map. It was essentially a square bordered by the Potaro to the north and the Essequibo to the east, stretching into the jungle in the south and west part of the way toward Micobie, an indigenous village to the south, and Mahdia, the little mining town west of Liberty Point. It was pretty clear this was going to be the center of commerce and wealth for the area around it, if for no other reason than that there wasn’t much in the way of commerce and wealth anywhere else in the neighborhood.

But Pierce said that was a crime because a proper effort at exploiting the natural resources in that area would make every single human around there rich as Mansa Musa. He started rattling off the stuff that was under the ground, beginning with gold and diamonds and moving on to all kinds of other things, and he said all it would take was a little bit of real infrastructure, and this could be one of the richest places on the planet.

“It’s all small-time shit here so far,” he said, “but it doesn’t have to be that way. I really want to help these people get what they deserve.”

Pierce was especially proud of the hydroelectric power plant they’d built. The Potaro was pretty rapid in its downflow into the Essequibo, so what they’d done was wall off part of the river and repurpose an old set of land dredges that somebody had put in to harvest gravel decades ago into a firmament to install a series of vortex turbines that ran along the south bank of the Potaro. Each one of them supposedly spat out 15 kilowatt-hours of power, and there were 100 of them along the river. I met a guy named Fred Tranh, who was the engineer in charge of this thing, and he was giddy about the project.

“There’s a weir on the Potaro just upriver from the Liberty Point property,” he said, “and we’re negotiating the rights to it. When that’s done we’re going to install six big-ass turbines along that weir, and it’ll set us up with enough hydroelectric power to juice up this whole region. Won’t need any more generators for 40 miles.”

“You don’t need a dam for that?” I asked him.

“Not with this new tech we’re using. It absolutely kicks ass. And it’ll run almost completely without outside support. Total fire-and-forget project.”

Tranh said a company out of Belgium supplied the turbines. They’d had to fly them into Georgetown, then put them on ferryboats up the Essequibo to get them to the landing site, and then truck them along the little road they’d carved to the sites. He showed me all the video of the hydro plant construction, and I’ve got to admit it — even though I don’t have a drop of construction enthusiast blood in me, this was fascinating stuff.

I could hear Tim Allen oinking while I was watching Tranh’s video. And I wondered when Allen, or maybe Mike Rowe, was going to make it down here.

Everything about the place was fascinating. They’d gone in with three of these single-grip forest harvesters, which can turn 100 trees a day each into stacks of logs, and they’d cleared out first a path from Mahdia, which was about 17 miles away from the confluence of the Potaro and the Essequibo, to Liberty Point, and then they started clearing the site itself.

Kournis told me that the first thing they’d built was the Landing, which turned out to be a pretty cool deal. It was this big restaurant/bar facility with an outdoor amphitheater that faced out onto the confluence of the two rivers, together with a bunch of piers and moorings for boats just west of it, where there had been a strip mine and a deep pit somebody had dug. What they’d built just west of the Landing was not really a marina, but sort of like one.

Kournis said that after they opened the man-camp where the first 200 or so construction workers had come in, they’d cleared the trees from the confluence point and built the Landing, and that was where they’d feed and entertain the folks.

And eventually, they’d put up enough buildings that the man-camp was dismantled and the workers started crashing in the apartments they’d built. Kournis said it was amazing how much faster the work went once that had happened.

I noticed there was a bug-zapper under every single streetlight, and there were lots of lights, all of them a good 25 feet off the ground. I asked what the deal was.

“Do you notice all the mosquitoes?” was Kournis’ response.

“Not really,” I said.

“Exactly.”

He said the bug-zappers had been an on-site idea because in the initial stages of the construction process, the mosquitoes were so bad that the men were essentially having to work in hazmat suits. Clearing the forest set loose every manner of hostile natural response possible, and the insects turned out to be the most irritating.

So the answer was lights, high up, and bug zappers. And over the course of the four months or so when the first phase of the project was finding its footing, the zappers greatly diminished that mosquito population.

“I’m surprised the eco crowd hasn’t thrown a fit,” I said.

“Well, you’re pretty well-informed. How much did you know about this project?”

“Until Pierce mentioned it Thursday night, nothing.”

“Right. Nobody knows about Liberty Point. We’ll keep it that way as long as we can. Then it’s a fait accompli, and if they don’t like it, screw ‘em.”

Later, I asked Pierce about the bug zappers. He laughed and said I hadn’t heard the best part.

“We’re emptying the catch bins and boxing up the products,” he said, “and at some point I’m going to ship those little boxes to Klaus Schwab and John Kerry and Bill Gates and whoever else with a note that says, ‘Eat Ze Bugz.’”

“Want to see the video of one of those guys opening that up,” I said.

“Hell yeah.”

The people at Liberty Point were mostly Sentinel Construction guys, and they were getting triple wages down there. It was a level of hustle you just never see in American construction; there were barges bringing in steel for the structures of those buildings, and it was immediately dumped into a materials yard along the shore of the Essequibo, then trucked to the next building site where cranes would set the girders into pre-set foundations and rivet them together into a skeleton, and then came the concrete-and-stone blocks. All the buildings were designed the way the old Spanish and Italian cities — and some of the ones in southern France too — had been set up. They were essentially hollow squares that took up a city block and had courtyards in the middle. Everything was three stories, and the first story would have a parking garage — though there weren’t really any cars; mostly everybody went around in golf carts — and space for stores, coffee shops, restaurants, and whatever, though there weren’t much of those businesses in place yet.

Then the second and third floors were where people lived.

There was a decent-sized little park in the middle of the town and a movie theater — that was where lots of folks congregated at night. Pierce said the theater could also be repurposed for live music, and that they were going to start flying bands down to do weekly concerts.

“Sounds cool,” I said, “but wouldn’t your amphitheater be better for that?”

“In the dry season, yes. In the wet season, nope. It’s gotta be inside once the rains start coming.”

The buildings all had cisterns equipped with water filters collecting rainwater from the roofs and, when full, those were supposed to enable each building in Liberty Point to be self-sufficient in generating its own potable water supply. But they also had a water treatment plant along the Potaro and a full sewer and water system that would accommodate up to 10,000 people.

“You went all out on this thing, Pierce,” I said. “Is this just some erector set for you? I don’t really get the motivation to go through all this trouble to put this together in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s because it’s the middle of nowhere,” he said. “When we’ve got Liberty Point fully built, and we’re racing to get that done before the rainy season fully kicks in, we’ll be a little paradise that almost nobody can get to.”

“What, like a hermit kingdom?”

“More like a refuge for when the world goes absolutely to shit.”

“So you’ve bet eight billion dollars that the world will go to shit.”

“Yeah, and I’d say it’s the safest bet going. You pay attention to current events. Watching what’s happening to Taiwan? The Chinese are going to get that place without firing a shot.”

The Taiwanese president, who had been overwhelmingly elected on a platform of opposing unification with mainland China despite the ChiComs backing his opponent to the hilt, had resigned the previous week with no explanation given. The Parliament had gone into emergency session and appointed an interim president who gave a speech stressing “conciliation” with China. A flood of Taiwanese had taken to the air and sea to get off the island, with lots of them turning up in Hawaii and the Philippines. The Deadhorse administration had congratulated the Taiwanese on their “peaceful governmental transition.”

“I’m just not gonna give up on America,” I said.

“Me neither, Mike, but I have the means to hedge my bets, and so I’m doing it in a place that I can control. Liberty Point is that place.”

“You’re likely to have a flood of immigrants when the folks find out about it.”

“And the interesting thing is, between the fresh water and the natural gas and the minerals and the other assets we have here, we could very easily build a first-class city of a million people here.”

“You know there’s one flaw in your plan, though,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“What happens when the Venezuelans drop in out of helicopters and declare that all of this is theirs now?”

“Oh, that? Screw that. They wouldn’t dare.”

“Let’s say you’re wrong. What then?”

“It’ll be the biggest mistake they ever make, I’ll tell you that.”

Back home in Atlanta Sunday night, I was visited by a pair of feds.

“We’re agents Smythe and Muhammad, FBI,” said the black guy.

“I take it you’re Smythe and she,” I said, pointing at the white lady, “is Muhammad?”

“Very funny,” he said. “Can we come in?”

“What’s this about?”

“We understand you were out of the country this weekend.”

“So what if I was?”

“We’d like to ask you some questions about your trip.”

“I see no reason why anything that went on this weekend would be of interest to you guys,” I said. “What’s more, I’m not an idiot, and therefore I don’t talk to the FBI without a video camera recording and an attorney present. Sorry, y’all.”

That earned me a stink-eye from Smythe. Or maybe she really was Muhammad. Either way, that visit freaked me out enough that I texted my old buddy Morris Moskovitz, who I’d known going all the way back from my time living in New York.

Morris was, as he called himself, the Perfect Jew. Except he wasn’t perfect. He was an old fart, about 70, and the hair atop his head had decided at some point to grow out of his ears instead. Morris ate too much and he drank too much and he didn’t care about the consequences, which were advancing on him.

Most of all, Morris was the funniest human being I knew. I had told him that he was born too late.

“You should have been in your grandparents’ generation,” I said. “You could have gone into comedy and shared the stage with Youngman and Rickles and Dangerfield.”

“Oy vey,” he said. “And scratch out a living in the Catskills? Whaddya, special?”

Instead, Morris was a lawyer. A pretty good one.

I had met him because every day he’d eat lunch at a delicatessen on the ground floor of ANN’s building in Manhattan. I’d be in there all the time, and there he was with his newspaper, his legal pad, and his Reuben sandwich. The little conversations we struck up became big ones, and when Logan Rudolph got me shitcanned at ANN, Morris handled the severance negotiations and did very right by me. He’d been my lawyer ever since.

Especially when he decided in the middle of the COVID lockdowns that he’d had it with New York.

“I guess I’m not the Perfect Jew after all,” he told me. “A Perfect Jew would move to Miami. I’m only going so far as Atlanta. What does that make me?”

“Like a two-thirds Perfect Jew,” I said, figuring that was about the difference in distance between the two destinations and Manhattan.

“Heh,” he said. “Anyway, you have me to complain about now. I’m moving to your town.”

And he found a nice Jewish deli in Buckhead where he plopped down daily, and the two of us would eat lunch once or twice a week.

But I texted him an invitation to a diner open late, and included the words “dying to see you” at the end.

“Twenty minutes,” he said.

And 20 minutes later, Morris was sitting down and asking me, “What the hell are you doing interrupting my spring football game?”

He was the only human being I know who gave a damn about the new UFL the TV networks were pushing. Morris was a die-hard Birmingham Stallions fan for some strange reason.

“I had a visit from the FBI,” I said, and told him the story.

“Ahhh, you don’t need me,” he said. “I do contracts! I look like a criminal lawyer to you?”

“I’m not gonna get into what you look like, Morris,” I said, which earned me a smile. “All I know is you’re my lawyer. So if I need counsel on this thing, can you help me find somebody?”

“This is what I would do if I was you,” he said, slurping on a black coffee the waitress had brought him. “I’ll find you a criminal defense lawyer, you hire the guy not just for you but for everybody on your staff. I doubt they’ve hit any of them up but it’s probably coming. If everybody is covered, you then have an unbroken line of defense.”

“Fine.”

“What you don’t need is somebody on your staff ratting you out to the feds.”

“Morris, I haven’t done anything. All I did was agree to write the biography and take on the PR job.”

“Yeah, and you didn’t bring me the contracts! Whaddya doing, you zhlub!”

“What the hell is a zhlub?”

“A schmendrick! A meshuggeneh! A fool!”

“Morris, we don’t even have a contract yet.”

“And he paid you already?”

“Yeah.”

“Pierce Polk does business on a handshake?”

“With me he does.”

“Oh, look at you then! I’ll get you contracts, have him sign them. And you should make him front you the cost for the lawyer. Understand?”

“Sure, that makes sense. But why would the FBI be up in my face, anyway? That’s just strange.”

“Intimidation, Michael. You went with Polk to Guyana, that means you’re in his circle now. And they know that you are.”

“But so what?”

“So he has a target on his back.”

I scowled at Morris. The idea that my college roommate — who for all of his flaws was an especially upright and moral man and whose professional and personal ethics were generally head-and-shoulders above those of his competitors and acquaintances — would be treated as a villain really offended me.

I hadn’t fully processed the idea that I was now one of Pierce’s guys. Pierce did a company-wide thing once a year, and when he did it he would literally rent out an NBA or NHL arena, like the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville that he’d paid for last year, for an all-day “Sentinel Reset Summit” that Tony Robbins would put on.

Robbins’ stuff and the stuff Pierce’s people bought in on were very similar. And honestly, I couldn’t argue with it. These folks regularly kicked the ass of the competition, and they did it by winning with better productivity and better price. They were kicking the shit out of the Chinese, for crying out loud; most American companies were busy selling out to the Chinese, and Pierce’s guys were whipping them.

And this guy was a crook?

Maybe I was settling into the cult. On the other hand, you didn’t have to be part of the cult to be supremely pissed off about the feds and their heavy-handed bullshit where Pierce was concerned.

“It’s not like he’s a criminal,” I protested to Morris. “He has armies of lawyers. He turns a profit the old-fashioned way. What do they have on him?”

“The fact that Omobba and Deadhorse hate him. That’s what they have. And in case you haven’t been paying attention, that’s a lot.”

“Terrible.”

“Yes, Michael. It makes me glad I’m a septuagenarian. I’ll be long gone when this all goes to hell. You, on the other hand, will be neck deep in this mishegoss. And now I’m going home to watch the second half. I’ll text you the number of someone to call in the morning.”

And then he left, prompting me to fulminate over a hamburger steak.

Just then I got a text. It was from Ashley. “Check your email,” it said.

So I did, and at the top of my inbox was a message that had as a subject…

“Dear Michael.”