Of Rings and Torches: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 1

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, From Hellmarsh With Love, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator each weekend in September, October, and November, 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.

London, July 5, 2024

“…the electoral collapse of the ruling Conservatives hasn’t led to the largest Labour majority in modern history,” the BBC reporter on the telly was saying, “but the rout in last night’s parliamentary elections is most peculiar given that Labour has won only just more than one-third of the overall vote. As mandates go, this is much success without, perhaps, a strong deal of substance. The new PM, Piers Stormer, faces a daunting challenge in solidifying public support…”

The young billionaire shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“You might have not much time,” he said in the unmistakable accent of a foreigner, “Prime Minister.”

“Well, then,” the well-turned-out, bespectacled politician responded as he sipped his tea, “we shall be quite aggressive.”

That earned a smile from across the table.

The BBC reporter was going on about the new Labour government and how it was seen to be more moderate than previous iterations of that party, but that its campaign platform was quite thin on policy promises. No one really knew what was in store.

The politician smiled at the talking head’s words.

“More aggressive than our billing, I should think.”

“Quite so,” said the young billionaire, while reaching into his case for a sheaf of papers. “As you must. Now, as we discussed, there are priorities that my associates and I have…”

“I’ll stop you here,” said the Prime Minister. “We’ve agreed on the items you expressed in our meeting of six April. But the election is over. And while the Party is grateful for your support and expects it to continue, our priorities are our own.”

“I do not take your meaning, sir,” said the young billionaire. “The support to which you refer was contingent on certain promises being kept.”

“And they will. Of that, you may be sure. But beyond those obligations, our side will not be held. We shall control the government we have won. And our watchword shall be ‘change.’”

“Yes, we are aware of your watchword. What we are unclear, even at this late date, on what it means.”

“Well,” said the Prime Minister with a smile, “as I’ve expressed, we shall be quite aggressive. Now, if there is nothing else…”

“Until we meet again,” said the young billionaire, a look of unhappy dissatisfaction on his face. “I wish you luck in your endeavors.”

“And you, sir,” said the Prime Minister. “Have a safe flight.”

Lake Lanier, Georgia, August 7, 2024

When he popped the question, the first thing I thought of was that I’d had a crush on Mike Holman for almost 20 years. And if somebody had told me that he would end up being my husband back when I was a little girl, I’d have thought they were crazy.

I was maybe 10 years old when I first knew about him. He had a cable news show on TV and my mom discovered him. She watched Mike Holman Tells The Truth on ANN religiously. Every night. And when she couldn’t watch, she’d record it and it would be on in the kitchen the next morning while she served us breakfast.

Mom had the crush first. It irritated my dad. The Great Peter Chang, who had Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein and Barry Omobba on speed-dial, and who had bankrolled the California Democratic Party since Chang Pan-Pacific had become one of the world’s largest import-export firms in the 1980’s, did not like being upstaged in Mary Smithson Chang’s eyes by some TV talking head.

And when Mike lost that show on ANN because of some stupid fight with the son of the network’s owner, Dad lorded it over Mom’s and my heads for a year.

But it never really stopped me — or Mom, for that matter — from being a fan. I never told Mike that, and I’m going to try not to ever do it. Now that I know him personally, my girlhood crush on him is the kind of information that would go straight to his head.

Besides, a wife has to keep some leverage over her husband, right?

It was a whirlwind courtship, really. We joke that our story is something out of that Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner Romancing The Stone movie, or maybe that Channing Tatum-Sandra Bullock thing that came out last year. A big adventure that ends in romance. For us, it was that war in Guyana that we were right in the middle of; toward the end, we were really in the middle of it.

Right down to the part when I got shot saving Donny Trumbull, who I’d expect will be president again next year, when an Iranian would-be assassin nearly killed him as he boarded a helicopter after giving a speech to buck up the Guyanese and keep them from surrendering to the Venezuelans.

I know, right? My joke now is that I’m literally a badass. Not because I used to be a Secret Service agent. That’s not why I’m calling myself a badass. I’m a badass because I took a bullet in my right butt cheek and now I’ve got a big scar and a little dimple where it went in. I guess I traded thong underwear and bathing suits for a spot of fame; so be it.

Mike says my dimple is cute. As he’s the one guy I’m comfortable with giving a view of my ass to, that works for me.

I helped him finish his biography of his friend Pierce Polk, the uber-billionaire and Mike’s college roommate, and, as you know, it’s a massive seller that has really made Mike’s fortune. The book just came out and it’s already sold a million copies in its first week. His career as an independent web publisher, podcaster, and journalist was already taking off, which brought him full circle after falling from the heights of a prime-time TV news anchor on a national cable network. The book just made him an even bigger deal.

So by the time he popped the question, that little-girl crush I had on him had become a whole lot bigger. It was a big-girl crush by then. And even though we’d barely known each other for a couple of months, it didn’t even seem fast that he’d ask me to marry him.

Sometimes you just know.

From the time I actually met him, which was when he interviewed me about what happened in Terre Haute in May, I knew that I liked the real-life Mike Holman better than the old TV Mike Holman from my girlhood. And while he was a pro during that interview, when I next saw him down at Liberty Point, which was Pierce’s Shangri-La down in Guyana, I could tell he liked me, too.

I’ve spent a lot of the last year in hell. You work your whole adult life at a career, in my case in the Secret Service, only to have it collapse around you in a public way, and that’s soul-shattering. But I don’t know that I would trade any of it, because if everything didn’t happen the way it did I wouldn’t have this great guy.

I know I’m not supposed to say this, but the great guy is a lot more important than the job. Lots of women get that, but you sure as hell won’t read it in Cosmo.

Anyway, after I got shot in Guyana, or more to the point, after I got out of the hospital, Mike insisted that I go back to the States with him. His idea was that I move in with him at his house in Buckhead — Holman Media’s headquarters was in midtown Atlanta, after all.

I said “hell, no” to that. Mike’s place was essentially a bachelor-pad bungalow, totally out of date and in need of a big renovation. It was like a museum to his career, with framed pictures on all the walls of him with interview subjects and other famous people. When I first saw it I was like, “What is this, the Brown Derby?”

He laughed, and then he said “Hey, if you don’t like this place, fine. I was thinking about selling it anyway.”

And he put it on the market three days later.

Meanwhile, The Great Peter Chang called me and told me he was there for me after I got shot. I almost told him to get bent. Again.

I’d had a massive fight with The Great Peter Chang after I’d gone on Mike’s podcast and blown the whistle about corruption in the Secret Service after what happened in Terre Haute. The Great Peter Chang informed me that my big mouth had ruined my career in government and that he had the power to ensure if I’d just stayed quiet about the security holes everybody thought were my fault. I told him to get bent for real after he pulled that stunt on me.

And when I got shot, Dad didn’t fly down to Guyana. He didn’t fly to Atlanta to see me after I came back to the States to recover. But he was “there” for me.

I almost told him to get bent again. But instead, I did something I had decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t do.

“OK, Dad,” I said, looking at the VRBO website on Mike’s laptop as I spoke to him on the phone. “I need a place to recover. I’m looking at a four-bedroom on Lake Lanier. It’s very peaceful, but it’s pricey.”

“Whatever,” he said. “Book it on my AMEX.”

And even before Mike sold his house, we moved into that palace, which was owned by a very famous SEC football coach.

Those afternoons and evenings on the lake were literally the best moments of my life. I spent a month in a bikini watching him finish that book, and we otherwise just decompressed and hung out. He told me stories — he’s got a lot of stories — and we grilled out and drank great wine pretty much every night.

And on one Wednesday evening, right after he sent the completed first draft of the manuscript of the Pierce Polk biography off to the Holman Media team to read through it, he found me in the kitchen.

“Hey,” he said, giving me a certain look that I’d not seen before. I thought I’d seen all his looks. He’s got some great ones, but none like this.

“What?”

“I have a question for you. It might seem like it’s, I don’t know, over-fast.”

“Over-fast? Is that even a word?”

“Probably not, but whatever. Do you want to get married?”

“What, to you?”

“Yes, to me. PJ, will you marry me?”

“Are you serious?”

Out came the ring.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

I gulped.

“My head is spinning,” I said. “Are we really doing this now?”

“This is why I’m worried that I’m over-fast.”

“Yes.”

“Too over-fast?”

“No, dummy. YES! Of course, I’ll marry you! But you need to pinch me because I’ve got to be dreaming.”

Then he pinched me on the back of my hand. It hurt, and I hit him, and then I basically attacked him with my mouth.

We decided we’d get that wedding done pretty much right away. As far as I was concerned I didn’t need a big ceremony. All of my adult friends had been in the Secret Service and pretty much none of them would touch me with a 10-foot pole anymore, and I only had a few left over from college. And I definitely didn’t want The Great Peter Chang to use my wedding as a business networking event, which I knew he’d normally do.

Not to mention I knew he’d throw a fit over the match. The politics were wrong. Dad had been insistent that I marry somebody at least as rich as he was, which was stupid given my job — what was I going to do, try to hook up with some Secret Service protectee? — and he’s got that old-school idea that marriages are best arranged through the families, which this certainly wasn’t.

Dad was full of crap, of course, because Mary Smithson Chang was most certainly not an arranged bride. Mom was a Golden State Warriors dance team girl studying law at Cal-Hastings when Dad met her. She was a nearly six-foot blonde who looked more like she belonged on a movie set than a courtroom; there isn’t a Chinese family anywhere who would have picked her for Dad’s wife.

Yes, he’s a hypocrite. No, we’ve never really gotten along. There are only so many times that a perfectly respectable decision is treated with angry disapproval before the father-daughter relationship gets strained beyond enjoyment.

He didn’t want me to go to UCLA, but I went there on a full athletic scholarship because I was an all-state pole vaulter in high school, and that was an extracurricular activity of mine he also disapproved of. He didn’t agree with my choice to major in Criminal Justice but went along with it under the idea that it would lead to law school. And he really didn’t agree with me joining the Secret Service out of college.

Though that was a hit of sorts with all his political friends.

And now Mike?

We made the call, I made sure that Mom was on speaker with him, and I announced the engagement.

“I know that this isn’t the traditional way it’s done,” I said, “but we agree that we have something special between us that really has to mean we’re together. So Mike and I have agreed we’re going to get married.”

“Oh, Pauline, that’s so wonderful!” said Mom. “And he’s so handsome and famous and successful, and I’ve always liked him…”

“Thanks, Mrs. Chang,” said Mike. “That’s really sweet of you.”

I waited and waited.

“Dad?” I said. “Say something.”

“Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

Mike gave me a pained look. I shrugged.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “I want you to know that I’m head over heels in love with your daughter and I’m committed to keeping her happy and safe, and we’ll make sure there are grandchildren and a loving family, and…”

I looked at him. “I think you’re making it worse,” I whispered.

He gave me a frustrated look.

“Do you have a date yet?” Mom asked. “I’m wondering if we can get the Presidio for the reception, or maybe one of the hotels downtown.”

“Zero plans made yet,” I said. “But I do want to do it soon. Things are so busy for us right now that I think we just need to make this happen and move on.”

“Hmmmph.” That was Dad.

“Well, let us know,” said Mom. “You know I’ll help. Whatever you need.”

That rather less-than-satisfactory reaction having put me in a lousy mood, and our next call — which was to his mother — going to voicemail, Mike then called Pierce on speaker.

“What’s up, dude?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “And when are y’all coming back down to Liberty Point? You’d be amazed — we’ve fixed up everything that got hit in the war, we’ve got a four-lane highway going in between here and Mahdia, we just finalized the plans for a bridge over the Essequibo, we restarted construction on the Liberty Torch monument which is now gonna be a war memorial, and…”

“Pierce,” said Mike. “I need to get a word in edgewise.”

“Absolutely. What’s going on?”

“We’re getting married!” I blurted out.

“No shit? That’s freakin’ amazing! But why would you marry him? Come on, PJ. You can do way better than Holman!”

“You asshole,” Mike said, laughing. I gave him a mean look for that. I’d already told him that he swears too much and I noticed that it was rubbing off on me.

“Well, where are you doing the wedding?”

“No idea yet,” I said.

“Then come down here and do it at Liberty Point! I mean, you guys are pretty much family, and we’ve got five-star accommodations, plus a big airport all fixed up to fly everybody in. In fact, the cathedral is nearly finished.”

“The cathedral?” I asked.

“Yeah. Everybody decided we’d put up a Catholic church first at Liberty Point, if for no other reason than that it fits with the style here. Y’know, the layout of the place being very Mediterranean, it needs to have a Catholic church in it. And it turns out that there’s no diocese around here, so we’ll actually be starting one. Plus there’s a Catholic priest in Mahdia, so Father Simon is getting to be a bishop, I think. Or something. Anyway, yeah — in three weeks we’ll have a good-sized Catholic cathedral with stained glass windows and everything that you guys can get married in, and you know that the Grand Waica is a kick-ass place for a reception, so…”

He was talking a mile a minute, and Mike was chuckling. This was Pierce Polk. You just wound him up and before you knew it he’d run you over with ideas on top of ideas about ideas.

But I thought it was fantastic.

“OK, but it’s going to be really expensive to fly all these people into Guyana from, I guess, mostly San Francisco and Atlanta,” I said.

“No problem. I’ll cover it. We’ll charter a couple of 737s and fly y’all down here. We’ll call it a promotional expense from the Liberty Point Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.”

“You don’t have a CVB in Liberty Point, Pierce.” That was Mike.

“I do now.”

“Done,” I said.

“Cool. I actually know a great wedding planner, too. She handled my second one. Too bad the marriage didn’t go as well as the wedding. I’ll have her call you. You spend three hours with her and then all you have to do is show up.”

“Again, done,” I said.

“Oh, man, this is so great. We’ve been trying to think about how we were going to celebrate the victory here. Finishing the Liberty Torch is one thing, and…oh, wow! You need to do the wedding in like three and a half weeks because what we’ll do is light the torch to celebrate the wedding! How awesome is that?”

“Right? Yeah. We’re totally in.”

Mike looked at me.

“What?” I said.

He just half-smiled, half-grimaced, and shook his head.

“OK, I gotta go,” said Pierce. “We’ve got the Argentinian trade minister here and I’m hosting him for dinner. We’re doing a trade deal with them and the new government in Venezuela. Big stuff. But I’ll be in touch. Congrats, Mike! I think this might be the only good news I’ve ever heard about your love life!”

Then he was gone.

“He’s a really good friend,” I said.

“Yep. He is that,” said Mike. “A bit overpowering, but yeah.”

It’s a bit of a weird relationship between Mike and Pierce,

I think it’s because Mike has always felt like he was in Pierce’s shadow. That’s not unnatural; the whole word, pretty much, is in Pierce’s shadow.

Depending on what day it is and what happens in the stock market, Pierce is anywhere from the third to the seventh richest man in the world. He owns no less than six Fortune 500 corporations. When I say he owns them I mean he owns them privately, as in, he never took any of them public. And even though the Deadhorse administration has sicced the Justice Department on Sentinel Security — last I heard there were big problems with the prosecution’s evidentiary disclosures and the case was on the verge of collapse — without Pierce Polk’s companies most of the country’s largest ports wouldn’t operate, most of the internet would be wide open to computer hackers, VIPs around the world wouldn’t have protection and aerospace would largely grind to a halt.

Among other things.

He now runs those companies from this brand-new little city he built for $8 billion in the middle of the jungle on the Essequibo River in Guyana, and he and the few thousand ex-military guys he recruited to join him down there held off pretty much the entire Venezuelan army when the Madiera government decided to invade. And almost everybody thinks that Pierce had Madiera killed, which ended that war and brought democracy back to Venezuela.

The point is, if you were going to measure yourself and your accomplishments against Pierce Polk, what you would get was a profound sense of inadequacy.

I sensed, and then he flat-out admitted it, that for Mike this was an issue he’d never really come to terms with, which is why Mike’s career as a journalist, especially after he lost the ANN show 20 years or so ago, led him to go on his own as an independent with a little website (that he’s now grown into a huge media property) and YouTube channel (which now gets millions and millions of views for every podcast he does). For most of that time, he was broke, barely paying the bills for that staff of his. Pierce tried to get him to buy him out or at least accept funding, but Mike just turned him down again and again.

Until, finally, Pierce hit him this spring with the idea of doing that biography. Mike couldn’t turn that down, and the money Pierce paid Mike to do the book was literally the gasoline that his business needed.

Anyway, that’s why I wasn’t surprised at the cold-fish reaction Mike had to Pierce just monopolizing the discussion about the wedding and basically planning it himself with the two of us as spectators.

“Should I have told him no?” I asked Mike that night when we were lying in bed. “I feel like maybe I just gave away our moment, and that I made you uncomfortable.”

“I have no good arguments against doing the wedding at Liberty Point if Pierce will have us.”

“But you don’t really love it, do you?”

“What’s not to love? Almost everybody on the planet would kill to have Pierce Polk run their wedding. But we’re special, and we get it handed to us because I’m his media shill…”

“Oh, come on. No, you’re not.”

“Yeah, I am. I’ve made my peace with that. And you? Well, you’re the girl he saved when the wolves came to your door after Trumbull got shot, right? Both of us owe him.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s not. And it is. Look, you take the good with the bad when it comes to Pierce. You already know this, but literally everything he touches turns to gold. All of it is first class. That’s why it’s so exhausting. Nobody can keep up with him.”

“But doing the wedding down there is perfect, baby. It’s where we met, you know, socially. And if nothing else, I want my Dad to meet Pierce. There are very few people The Great Peter Chang meets who have the kind of money he has, so he probably can’t handle dealing with Pierce Polk.”

“I agree, that alone probably makes the trip worthwhile.”

“Oh, you bet it does. But what about the honeymoon? That ought to be your call.”

“I’ve thought about that a little, actually.”

“Oh, good. Where are you taking me?”

“London.”

“OK, interesting choice. Are we safe there, though? The U.K. is, like, kinda dicey now.”

There were daily news reports about civil unrest in the streets of British cities pretty much ever since the new very-left-wing government had taken office. It started when a deranged kid had gone on a stabbing spree at a dance class for little girls who were learning how to mimic the Spice Girls’ old moves, killing three people and badly maiming several others. The kid was a native Briton, but his parents were from Nigeria or Mali or somewhere and the word got out that he was a Muslim. That didn’t turn out to be true, but by the time it was clarified there were riots everywhere — and the new Prime Minister, some guy named Stormer who reminded me of Greg Kinnear’s character in Sabrina, sent the police out to round up all the protesters and none of the Muslims, who were happy to take to the streets and do damage as well.

It was getting really weird in the U.K., and yet Mike wanted to go to London for our honeymoon.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said.

“OK, but just so you know, I mean it when I say I’m retired from all the Secret Service kickass-girl stuff. You want to make an honest woman out of me, you better be ready for me to turn into Mega-Wife material. That means you take punches for me.”

“You don’t think I would do that?”

“Well, I mean, I’m the one who got shot that last time.”

“And you will never, ever stop talking about it, too.”

“Au contraire, monsieur. Like I said, I’m done. I went out bigger than Elway. Next time I feel pain like that, there’ll be a baby at the end of it.”

That made him smile. Big.

“There’s a reason I want to take you to London,” he said. “I have a couple of places I want to show you.”

“Well, I’ve never been.”

“There’s a pub. I went there when I was just out of college. I was dating this girl… anyway, it’s called The Spaniards Inn, and…”

“Oh my God! That’s where Taylor and Joe Alwyn had their first date!”

Mike was still coming to terms with my Swiftie fangirldom.

“Yeah, OK, well, my story kinda precedes that. Anyway, I always said that when I found The One, I’d go back there and have a night.”

“But you were married to Lisa. You guys never went?”

“PJ, she was never the one.”

“And I am.”

“Yes, darling. You are.”

“Then it’s London. I don’t care if they bring back the Blitz. We’re going. And I’m gonna sit in Taylor’s chair at that bar.”

“Pub, honey.”

“Right. And you know, while we’re there? We should go to Dorset!”

Mike was beginning to understand the depth of my genealogy obsession. I’d gotten it from my mom, who had gotten it from her grandmother. Tracing ancestry had become this super-addictive hobby of mine. And while I was sitting in the deck chair next to Mike as he tapped away at his keyboard finishing the book that would make him rich, I was on Ancestry.com and a few other sites putting together a pretty good investigation of his family line.

It turned out that the Holmans, or at least Mike’s Holmans, went back pretty far. They were an old American family that had Civil War officers on both sides of the fight, but before that, they had settled in Massachusetts only a few years after the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Holmans came from Dorset, along the southwest English coast.

So I was completely geeking out about Mike’s genealogy at that point. I don’t think he cared all that much.

“OK,” he said and then gave me a chuckle and a smile.

I leaned in and kissed him.

“You know,” I said, “with everything that’s going on over there, we could make it a working honeymoon. I can do your camera work and be your producer, and you can do your podcast and interview some people…”

“Nope,” he said. “I want a honeymoon-honeymoon. I just want to take a week and hang out with you.”

I just smiled at him. Mike is as passionate about his work as it’s possible to be, and I knew what he was telling me. He was letting me know he was even more passionate about me.

God, I love that man.

He kissed me and rolled over to go to sleep. But I sat up for a while.

How was I going to sleep? I’d just gotten engaged!

And I’d also let Pierce essentially take over my wedding. Which wasn’t really what Mike would have preferred. I mean, he did say that he didn’t have a good argument against going down to Liberty Point, and he said he was excited at the idea of introducing Pierce to The Great Peter Chang; we both thought that would be a terrific show.

But, was I starting off this engagement by dragging Mike further into Pierce’s orbit? Ever since I’d met Mike I’d been thinking a lot about a traditional role as a wife, and honestly, it attracted me.

Had I already ruined that for us? Was I disappointing him?

I wanted to shake him awake and ask him. But I managed not to. Instead, I just stared at the ceiling until finally, at last, sleep overtook me.

Liberty Point, Guyana, August 25, 2024

I was just getting used to the idea of a three-and-a-half-week engagement when, a couple of days later, Pierce called.

“Hey,” he said, “can you get down here for the wedding by the 22nd?”

“You want us to do it in two weeks?”

“If it’s possible. The thing is, I’ve got to be in Dubai the next week for this port deal I’m working on, and then I’m in Buenos Aires for a couple of days, and then I’ve got to be in Budapest for another trade thing. Would it be outrageous to move your thing up?”

Of course, it was outrageous. It was obnoxious for him to even suggest it.

On the other hand, Destiny, who was the wedding planner Pierce had set me up with, was already a dream come true. She’d called me and then put me on a Zoom call with Mom and a team of “wedding specialists,” and in less than two hours the plan they’d put together for us was nothing short of amazing.

“I’m so happy for you, honey,” Mom said when Destiny and her team got off the Zoom and it was just the two of us. “This is going to be a perfect wedding.”

She was all teary-eyed. That made me all teary-eyed.

“This is pretty painless,” I said. “I don’t know what the big deal is about planning a wedding.”

Then Destiny emailed her estimate, which went to me, Mom, and Pierce, and I almost had a heart attack.

“No problem,” Mom replied to Destiny. “Call me and I’ll give you the card.”

I called her first.

“You can’t,” I said. “That’s way too much just for a wedding and a reception. It doesn’t even count the travel for all the guests and accommodations, and…”

“Pauline, you’re my only daughter. And I have a feeling this match will stick. So this is the only one I’m going to get.”

“I do have three brothers, Mom.”

“Mother of the groom? Who cares about that? This is my show.”

“Dad will lose his mind over that invoice.”

“You let me worry about that. Besides, what else is he going to spend his money on? If he writes one more check to ActBlue I’m going to divorce him.”

Mom never, ever let anybody know about her politics. As far as her friends knew or assumed, she was a typical richy-rich California Democrat. But I knew differently. We’d be in her car — she made Dad crazy because she insisted on driving herself — on the way to mother-daughter lunches that she’d insist on picking me up from high school for, and Rush Limbaugh would be on.

“Don’t tell your father,” she’d say with a wink and a smile.

Anyway, no sooner had we settled on a massive production of a wedding but Pierce called and wondered if I wouldn’t mind tearing all of it up and starting over with an even shorter lead time.

“OK, I’m not even gonna answer this until I’ve talked to Mike,” I said, “not to mention my mom and dad, and his mom. But Pierce, you can’t just do a wedding on two weeks’ notice and…”

“Sure you can. When I married Constance we did it 10 days after we got engaged. Had 400 people at the wedding!”

“OK, Pierce, but that’s you. Most of us can’t operate that way!”

“Yeah, but…I’ll help. I mean, if it costs more, I’ll cover it.”

“The cost isn’t the problem, Pierce. We can afford it, even though this is an obscene amount of money for a wedding.”

“Well, yeah, but I don’t want to put you in a position where you’re hitting your dad up for more than he’s already agreed to just so this works on my schedule.”

“That’s nice of you, OK? But I’ll have to call you back.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call Destiny and I’ll let her know it’s possible we might move this up, and whatever help she needs to get it done, I’ll get my people on it so this can work.”

“Right, but I haven’t agreed to change the date, OK? Don’t change it without me telling you!”

“Of course not,” he said, as though I was crazy for thinking he was doing something he was clearly doing.

Mike was working at the office in Atlanta and he didn’t return my text for a long time. Finally, I called him.

“PJ,” he sighed when he answered the phone, “I’m a little busy right now.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have an emergency.”

“Uh oh. What’s the problem? Do I need to send somebody down there?”

Mike had a couple of pro security guys on loan at his office. They were with Sentinel Security, which was Pierce’s company, and both of them were ex-Navy SEALS. For the most part, they just hung around the office playing Mahjong on the computer and prowled around the parking lot. It was something of an extravagance to have Ted and Kalen around, but on the other hand, there had been at least three death threats made against Mike since I’d met him, and Kalen had stumbled upon a guy — he insisted that he identified as a female leopard and was very unpleasant, I’m told, when Kalen told him he didn’t give a shit what he identified as — who was sitting in the parking lot with an AR-15 and a dozen clips in a backpack. They held him there until the cops came, and they were going to cut the guy loose until somebody from Sentinel Network Security managed to hack into his computer and post a bunch of stuff from his hard drive onto his social media.

Very sick stuff. Very sick stuff about Mike. Threatening stuff.

And that’s when the guy got charged with more than a few things. He’s probably not getting out of jail soon. And Ted and Kalen stopped looking like an extravagance.

So it wasn’t the smartest thing I could have done to use the word “emergency” when I called Mike about the wedding. And I immediately said so.

“Sorry — it’s not that kind of emergency. It’s about the wedding. Pierce wants us to go down there two weeks from Thursday.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“It’s a big deal, Mike.”

“No, you’re right. I’m sorry. We’re just trying to get our research done for the podcast tonight.”

Mike was doing a show with Stephen Moore and Robert Reich about the tax plan that Pamela Farris, the vice president who had suddenly been anointed as the Democrats’ presidential candidate after that embarrassing incident with poor Joe Deadhorse at the debate, had put out.

She wanted to tax unrealized capital gains, plus an almost 50 percent tax on realized capital gains. She also came out with a “reparations” plan that would make it so that no black people in America would pay income taxes for the next 20 years. Then there was a plan to have the Federal Housing Administration pay the down payments — as in the whole down payment, up to 20 percent of the sale price — for first-time homebuyers, in return for the federal government owning a piece of the house. She was going to eliminate all student debt in America, and she also said she’d sign a bill eliminating independent contractors in the way her home state of California had done.

Three Wall Street hedge fund managers had just put out a TV spot saying that her economic plan would “literally turn the USA into Cuba,” and everybody who had money would hit the road just like Pierce Polk had. So Mike was going to host the great debate with the two economists and let them slug it out.

All of that was a bigger deal than my emergency, arguably.

“Pierce wants us to do the wedding in two weeks,” I repeated. I didn’t think it’d took when I’d said it the first time, and I was right.

“Oh, really? We’re going to get married on his schedule now?”

“He says he’ll take care of everything, he’ll cover all the extra costs, and all we have to do is show up. But he has like three overseas trips that have popped up, and…”

“PJ, I’ll do whatever you want. The wedding is your thing, the honeymoon is mine. Nobody is messing with my honeymoon plans; that, I can promise you. But if you want to move the wedding up, I’m good with that. I’m too old for a bachelor party and my guest list is a few relatives and the people from Holman Media and not really many more folks, so…”

“You’re blowing me off. I get it.”

“I’m not. I swear I’m not. But it’s like I told you: I want you. Big wedding, little wedding, no wedding and we just go to the courthouse and sign the papers. Whatever you want, baby. You just tell me where and when to be and I’ll be there.”

“OK. Honestly, though, I kind of feel like taking him up on this, and let’s just go and do it and get it over with.”

“In two weeks, you mean.”

“Yeah! If nothing else it’s a chance to go back down to Liberty Point and be royalty. I can’t wait for that.”

“Then it’s done. I’ll tell the crew up here to clear their schedules.”

And that was that.

I hung up the phone and set it on the kitchen counter and it immediately rang. It was Mike’s mom.

“Pauline, you can’t just have a three-and-a-half-week engagement,” she said as soon as I greeted her. “I know we don’t know each other very well, which, of course, is one reason for concern…”

“Mrs. Holman, I completely understand where you’re coming from,” I said. “But let me correct you: now it’s a two-and-a-half-week engagement.”

“What?” came the response after a couple of beats.

“I know. Pierce asked us if we could move it up. I’m about to tell him yes.”

“Oh, that Pierce Polk. Everyone around him just does what he says.”

“I mean, he’s hosting the wedding down in Guyana. He’s flying in the whole wedding party, giving us all free accommodations; he’s even lighting the Liberty Torch to celebrate us getting married.”

“The Liberty Torch?”

“They built a two-hundred-foot statue of a hand holding a torch, and it’s going to have a lit flame from a natural gas line he’s rigged up to it. It’s really cool. They’ll light it for the first time after we give our vows; you can see the torch from the front door of the church.”

“Oh, well, that is impressive.”

“I know. I couldn’t really say no to that.”

“But Pauline, darling, you don’t really know my son, and…”

“Mrs. Holman…”

“Emily. Just call me Emily.”

“Emily, I know it’s fast. But this is real. And I’m very excited to be your daughter-in-law.”

“Well, I’m excited too! I’m just saying that you might feel more comfortable if you took your time.”

“I understand. But we thought about it and we really just don’t want to wait. And neither of us are particularly impulsive people, so I guess take this as a sign of how deep both of us have fallen.”

“Well, all right,” she said, in a singsongy voice that told me it was anything but. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

“We’re going to be sending out travel information because we’re getting a charter flight from Atlanta to Liberty Point and all you have to do is be there. Everything else, like your hotel room and meals and entertainment, the whole thing is taken care of.”

“It’s like an all-inclusive resort wedding!” she said.

Just then my email on my laptop refreshed, and there was a message from Pierce.

“And it looks like we’re going to have…Sixpence None The Richer playing the wedding,” I said. “You remember that song Kiss Me that they play at all the basketball games when they put the camera on couples in the crowd? That was theirs.”

“Well, I guess the date is set, then.”

“It’s all moving really fast. I don’t think Mike even knows about this stuff.”

She said her goodbyes, making a show of hiding her misgivings about our sudden elopement, and I stopped for a breath.

Those two weeks were absolutely bonkers. It’s a good thing that Mike essentially forbade me from doing anything else but the wedding, because, even with Destiny and her army of pros and the massive resources of Pierce Polk’s corporate empire pulling this thing together, I was taking phone calls and handling emails 18 hours a day.

Mike was working like crazy. He said he was putting things in the can so that we could do the wedding and the honeymoon without work getting in the way, and what he and his team were doing was impressive. He interviewed three guys who had served in the Colorado National Guard with Farris’ vice presidential pick; apparently, he had made a practice of passing out English translations of Mao’s Little Red Books to all of the soldiers in his Guard battalion, calling them primers on “leadership.”

Mike also had an interview with a former Delta Force operator who had been in Central America investigating the Venezuelan gangs who were taking over the migrant trail; even though Venezuela’s government had turned over following the war, there was still a huge amount of migration going on from South America to the States, and it was the gangs, working with a couple of well-funded American nonprofits, amazingly, now in control of it.

And he interviewed Thayer Reid, the governor of Mississippi who’d just signed a bill liquidating the city government in Jackson, the state capital, because, as Reid said, “We can’t find a single municipal operation they’ve got in their control which isn’t functionally inert.”

He was really doing a lot of important, provocative stuff. I was proud of him. But I could tell he was doing it so he didn’t have to participate in the wedding plans.

Destiny told me that was normal.

“This is a girl’s game, honey,” she said. “If your fiancé wants to be involved in planning your wedding he’s either a control freak or a queer.”

“Destiny!” I scolded her. “You can’t say ‘queer’ like that!”

“Of course I can. That’s what the queers call themselves now.”

“Yeah, but if you’re not queer can you say it?”

“Hell yeah, I can.”

“OK.”

She was amazing, though. I’ve never seen anybody pull so big a production together in so short a time. And everything was so gorgeous. She had somebody come to the lakehouse and take my measurements for the dress, show me a webpage with two dozen custom design options from a dressmaker in New York, and in four days somebody came to the house to fit me with the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It was down to the floor, with a little bit of an A-line, but the thing that really blew me away was that it had a mesh illusion neckline and sleeves dotted with pearls.

Oh. My. God.

At that point, I didn’t care how much work it was to put this wedding on. Just get me into that dress.

Finally, amid four different crises that Destiny handled seemingly without breaking a sweat, we got everybody on that 737 in Atlanta — the Chang clan and all of the guests Dad insisted on dragging down to Guyana boarded a similar plane in San Francisco — and flew down to Liberty Point.

And the wedding went off without a single hitch. Over 300 guests, a brand new church, and a Catholic ceremony, which was funny. Mike says he’s Catholic “but I suck at it” and I’m not really anything; my Mom has been alternately Catholic and Episcopalian and The Great Peter Chang gives not a fig about religion, and yet they not only agreed to marry us but gave us a waiver from the usual six-month waiting period you’re supposed to have in the Catholic Church.

The reception was beautiful. The band was amazing. You might have seen the photo of Mike giving me the classic bend-down embrace that was on the front page of Holman.com — that happened as Kiss Me was playing, and it was just…

Perfect. It was perfect.

Oh — and they didn’t light the Torch after we said our vows. They lit it as the whole wedding party made its way out onto a giant penthouse balcony atop the Grand Waica Hotel, which looks out over the confluence of the Essequibo and Potaro rivers. Across the Potaro, to the north of where we were, was the Torch. It was floodlit with these gigantic lights, but as the wedding party gathered to look at the statue they turned the lights out.

Then came a fireworks display. Pierce had commissioned it from the people who did the fireworks at the Paris Olympics; he wouldn’t tell me how much he spent on it but it was well into the seven figures. As the fireworks came to a crescendo, which was one of those balls of explosions, it seemed to drop lower and lower over the Torch until it burst into flame as the fireworks lit the natural gas.

I was sure it would be like a bomb going off, but it wasn’t. It was just a big whoosh and all of a sudden there was a big fiery flare dancing atop that torch. If you’ve ever seen an oil refinery flaring gas atop a smokestack, that’s what this was.

And he did the whole thing for us. I was so excited I gave him a hug and a kiss to match what Mike got after we said our vows, and Pierce’s girlfriend — you know who she is, she’s Brienna Givens, the British model and tennis player — gave me a nasty look.

I didn’t think Brienna was mean. Her sister Sarah, who, I was told, Mike had a brief thing with before he met me which went badly, was the mean one. Sarah threw a fit over those fireworks, swearing that they’d set the jungle on fire and that Pierce was destroying the environment.

“We’ve had 11 inches of rain here in the past week,” Pierce chuckled, “and that boat you see in the Essequibo is a fireboat. I think it’ll be all right.”

Sarah ran a nonprofit called EarthChampions, of which Brienna was the chief financier. She was very big on saving the Earth.

“The fauna will be traumatized…”

“Sarah!” Brienna cut her off. “Shut up, darling.”

People were looking at her and she could tell. This was not the crowd to wax indignant about Pierce Polk’s carbon-emitting atrocities. So Sarah shut up.

I know, this is all a boring cliché of a thing, my going on about our whirlwind courtship and wedding. But look — four months earlier I was a Secret Service agent living in a one-bedroom in DC with zero prospects. I didn’t even have a cat. I hadn’t been on a date in almost a year. And for it to turn this quickly?

Like a dream.

Some of the reception did get a little weird. Predictably so. We knew that having The Great Peter Chang in the same room with Pierce was like mixing Coke and Mentos, and those two had been like a couple of dogs sniffing each other’s butts for three days by the time the booze had begun to flow.

I wasn’t sure how it started, but before we knew it they were arguing over some sort of port thing. I think it was the Panama Canal, maybe? Anyway, Pierce challenged Dad to a rock-paper-scissors competition with the Canal as the stakes.

I still don’t understand what they were talking about, even after my brother Kevin, the vice president of Logistics for Chang Pan-Pacific explained it to me, but the upshot was that whoever lost was banned from operating in the Panama Canal for 10 years.

And of course, Pierce won.

Kevin said it was probably for the best because there was some sort of interocean rail connector that Pierce was building in southern Mexico that would make it cheaper to run freight through than the Canal going forward. I’ve never paid much attention to the family business. Transportation and logistics and import-export stuff make my head hurt. I like simple jobs. Remember, I was a competitive pole vaulter. You run, you jump, you pull yourself up as the pole springs you over the bar and then you flip. You’re doing one thing at a time.

And that’s me. One-thing-at-a-time PJ.

Or Mrs. Holman to you.

On our wedding night, I noticed a very different Mike Holman than the one I’d been living with.

He was relaxed!

Mike is a super great guy. I know you’re not surprised to hear me say that. But, while he’s generally positive in his outlook, he’s got this tendency to see problems everywhere. He’s not an Eeyore. He doesn’t say “This is going to kill us” or “Because of that, we can’t do X.” But he’s definitely a worrier. “Watch out that Y doesn’t happen,” he’s always saying. “Don’t let them do Z.”

That was gone by the time the reception kicked into gear. It was like a flower opening up. Even Emily remarked on it. She said it was my doing, and she said her hesitations about our getting married so soon were “withdrawn.”

The Great Peter Chang was still a little frosty toward Mike. It was like it was my wedding for him, and there really wasn’t a groom. Mom acted… quite differently. Somebody remarked, given that Mike and my mom are sort of the same age, that they could be the newlyweds and it would also make sense.

That was Kayleigh, Mike’s podcast producer. She means well, but she’s always saying things that get her yelled at. I was too happy to yell at her. I just said she was right. Why get mad? She didn’t mean anything by saying that, even though it was super cringe.

Oh, and have I gone on about Liberty Point? What an amazing place! If you’ve seen the videos you know about it, but Pierce built it to look like a little Mediterranean city, with the stone buildings laid out with little courtyards in the middle of each block and big, wide boulevards with palm trees. Most of the vehicles are golf carts and the place has a real Disney feel to it, but somehow it feels more…authentic, I guess? than Disney.

And the airport is indoors. Or, better put, your plane pulls into one of several big hangars they’ve built and you come down the rolling stairs they pull up to the door of the plane and walk straight to the back where they unload your bags onto a pull-cart, and you can either just get into one of the cars that pulls into the covered driveway on the outside of the hangar or, if you’d rather, you can check your pull cart and go and drink at the huge bar in the far corner of the hangar.

Pierce said they built it that way because half the year it rains pretty constantly in Guyana. So instead, they’ve got a massive mural of a blue sky on the ceiling of the hangar and lit as though you’re outside on a gorgeous day.

Depending on the time of day, that is. Because the lighting adjusts based on what time it is. At night it looks like a starry night sky and the lights on the beams below the ceiling come on to give the hangars the look of a Mediterranean city at night.

That’s just the airport. Everything in Liberty Point is like that. The place is barely a year old and it’s already one of the most beautiful places on earth. Even The Great Peter Chang was impressed; a lot more impressed than he let on, Mom said.

Then there was the flight to London. On Pierce’s Gulfstream G700, of course.

That was one of his wedding presents to us.

The other was the house.

Pierce had a few different legal issues that the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies were harassing him over. One was about Sentinel Port Management, which manages port facilities all over the world; there was an allegation that Sentinel was involved in the international drug trade. Pierce had been really loud in objecting to the indictment that followed, offering a big reward to anybody who could prove that any of Sentinel’s people were involved in drug running and directly calling out Derrick Wreath, the attorney general, and the White House for cooking up a false allegation.

That resulted in the DOJ and the State of New York raiding the headquarters of Sentinel Port Management in Manhattan — only to find the entire place empty. Pierce got wind of the raid and evacuated his people, some three thousand of them, to South Carolina.

And from there, a bunch of them decided to join him in Liberty Point.

The State of New York then canceled its contract with Sentinel Network Security, another of Pierce’s companies which is the gold standard for network server protection; they’re really amazing and essentially make their clients’ servers utterly unhackable. And no sooner did they do that but a group of Chinese hackers took down the state’s entire network in the largest cybersecurity breach in world history.

For which, somehow, Pierce was indicted under New York’s new criminal fraud statute.

And then, just after the war in Guyana had ended, the DOJ indicted Sentinel Security Services for illegal arms dealing, because Pierce was using his private resources to stock up with military weapons to protect Liberty Point. It was really strange that this happened because all of Pierce’s arms trading was done under contract with the Guyanese Defense Force. The indictment rested on a really arcane interpretation of some international treaty to which Guyana wasn’t even a signatory, but since Pierce was an American citizen he somehow was covered by it even as an agent of a foreign government which he had registered as under FARA.

I’m telling you all of this because, as they were pushing these various legal cases — Mike called them lawfare cases, and noted it was the same playbook they were using against Trumbull — the FBI was raiding one after another of Pierce’s houses in the States.

He had eight. They raided all of them. When they arrived, every one of them had been cleaned out with some funny but insulting thing left behind.

Like when they hit his place in Telluride, the only thing left there was a velvet Elvis painting over the fireplace. When they raided his mansion in Big Sur, there was a scantily-clad silicon sex doll stationed at the front door holding a sign that said “F**k me? No, F**k You!”

Pierce made sure to post the security-camera footage, complete with audio, of the feds’ reaction to that, on X. Especially when one of the agents punched the doll and knocked her down. Pierce demanded he be charged with first-degree battery and police brutality.

He had a place on the water in Greenwich, Connecticut, that the FBI raided, but when they arrived they found that Pierce had let a dozen or so homeless veterans crash there, so, when the feds showed up, there was a TV truck from the local CBS station shooting video of the FBI harassing vets with PTSD. That occasioned a mild national scandal and a big black eye for the White House that the Republicans in Congress made a big deal out of.

And when they hit his house in Jupiter, Florida, Pierce had set up thousands of frog figurines — the cheap ones you get at Walmart — in funny alignments. Pictures of them went up on the internet and they went completely viral.

Pierce had just gotten a court order from a federal judge in Orlando revoking the seizure of the house in Jupiter, and he gave it to us.

As a wedding present.

It was a five-bedroom, eight-bath palace on the water in Admiral’s Cove. Seventy-five hundred square feet. I looked it up on Zillow and the site said it was worth eight million bucks.

I would actually have a bigger house than The Great Peter Chang.

Even Mike, who was normally taciturn about getting things from Pierce for all the reasons I’ve already talked about, couldn’t hold himself back at the news. He’d spent some time in that house on a couple of his trips to visit Pierce, and he said it was his “favorite crash pad.”

He was beaming.

“Are we going to move to Florida?” I said. “Are you moving the company?”

“I probably will. There’s no state income tax in Florida. That didn’t matter a lot when we were barely getting by, but now that we’ve gotten bigger and the money’s rolling in, it does. Besides, I need to save on the state income tax to pay the property tax on that monster.”

I couldn’t tell if he was serious about that, but I didn’t care.

And when the Gulfstream took off on the way to merry old England I thought my life had become a dream.

But the problem with dreams, as you know, is that they can turn.

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