A Flicker Of Light: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 7

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, From Hellmarsh With Love, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator each weekend in September and October, before its full publication on Amazon later this fall. From Hellmarsh With Love is the sequel to King of the Jungle, which was serialized at The American Spectator in Spring 2024. You can purchase it on Amazon here. And you can pre-order a signed copy of From Hellmarsh With Love at this link.

So far in the story, our intrepid hero, conservative podcaster and web publisher Mike Holman, married the love of his life, former Secret Service agent and president-saving heroine PJ Chang. After the wedding, Mike and PJ hopped on a jet for a honeymoon in London where all is not as it should be. Amid the growing chaos in Great Britain and the increasing disconnect between its ruling class and people, Mike changes his mind, thanks to PJ’s subtle influence, and begins doing interviews with some of the country’s movers and shakers.

The new Hard Left British government does not like that one bit, and Mike finds himself arrested on suspicion of conspiring to commit an act of terrorism. PJ is now thrown into a completely unfamiliar position, in a foreign country, beset by a hostile establishment that seems irrationally interested in persecuting her journalist husband. But she isn’t alone, and there are large wheels turning to save Mike.

Catch up on previous episodes here.

PJ tells us what happens next…

Abbey Wood, London, September 15, 2024

On Friday we were at the Central Criminal Court. It’s commonly called the Old Bailey. This was the bail hearing at which we were hoping to expose the insanity of the charges against Mike.

Brackett gave me the usual instructions in advance: dress elegantly, but don’t be showy. No outbursts, no visual signs of emotion. When I got to court, I saw why: the whole building, and the sidewalk outside, was crawling with photographers and reporters.

And as I sat with Mom and Simon behind the defense table where Brackett was with his other associate, a nice middle-aged black lady named Johanna Sturgill, I felt practically every eye in the courtroom boring a hole through me.

“This is really uncomfortable,” I whispered to Simon. “They’re glaring at me.”

“Not all of them. Some of them like you.”

The Daily Mail and the Sun had both run positive stories about Mike, and both of them had interviewed me. But all the Labour papers had doubled down on Mike and me as the “Terror Couple From America,” and it seemed pretty clear that there was a ton of spin going on in an effort to back down the outrage that was building about the case.

One of the reporters poked me gently from the row behind a little before it got started.

“Oi, ma’am,” he said. “Who is this striking lass you have with you, yeah?”

“That’s my mother, Mary Chang,” I told him.

And Mom turned around and looked at him. “You’re Daniel Howarth, right? With the Sun? Your piece on the case yesterday was quite good.”

His face lit up. “Thank you, madam,” he said, in a little more elegant accent.

That lit off a feeding frenzy of sorts as the other reporters then began scrambling to catch up to Howarth and interrogate me and Mom, because there couldn’t be a nugget of information about what was happening in that courtroom that they didn’t know.

In other words, this was turning into a circus. It was exactly what I was dreading.

Finally, things got started, and Judge Choudhary sat at his bench. Then Mike was led in and sat in the dock.

Something was wrong with him. He was white as a sheet and he looked like he’d lost his mom.

Which freaked me out to think. I hadn’t texted with her in a day or so. Had he lost his mom?

I wasn’t supposed to use my cell phone in the courtroom, but I texted her anyway. I said Mike was at his bail hearing, and that I hadn’t heard back about her EKG.

“It wasn’t very good,” she texted back. “They tell me that I’m under too much stress.”

Which is better than dead, I thought. “Be safe,” I texted her back.

So what was wrong with Mike? I looked at him, but he wouldn’t look at me. That made things worse.

I poked Brackett, and he leaned back.

“Can you go and ask Mike what’s wrong with him? There’s a problem.”

He looked at me quizzically, then looked at Mike.

“Your Honour,” he said to Choudhary, “before we begin might I have a moment to confer with my client?”

Choudhary gave a dismissive wave, so Brackett got up and went over to the dock. For a short while he and Mike talked, and I saw Brackett’s eyes get big. He nodded and returned to the defense table.

“Well?” I whispered.

“His cellmate died overnight,” said Brackett.

“Oh my God.”

“He hung himself from the top bunk with a bedsheet.”

“And Mike didn’t know?”

“He says he didn’t hear a thing. The man was dead when he woke up.”

“We can’t do this today! Right?”

Brackett shrugged.

The bail hearing began, and the prosecutor, a mousy-looking woman named Sybil Courtson-Weill, announced the Crown’s offer.

Brackett told Choudhary about the suicide. He said given those circumstances and the absurd nature of the charges, it was inappropriate to impose any bail conditions at all.

“These charges should be dropped, Your Honour.”

Choudhary said no.

Mike wanted to speak to the court in response, and Choudhary again said no.

So Brackett said there was a statement the defense wanted to read into the record. Choudhary said he would allow Brackett to read it. Which is what Brackett expected.

So he began reading. I looked at Mike, and he still wouldn’t look at me. He was looking at the judge, and I couldn’t tell what the look was. Not fear, not anger. Curiosity? Not exactly.

Disgust? Yeah, probably. Disbelief. That was it, or at least part of it.

But Mike was rattled. And Mike was never rattled.

I felt like I needed to jump in and help, somehow. But there was no way to help him. All the eyes in the courtroom were looking at him, and he seemed like he was completely miserable.

It didn’t help that he had on a prison uniform that fit him poorly. They wouldn’t allow him to put on real clothes for court.

“My client is an innocent man,” Brackett was saying. “He is guilty merely of airing controversial views which are not even his own. The Crown would have Your Honour believe that a protest, of which Mr. Holman had no plans to attend and is not an organizer of, is somehow a venue for violence he is conspiring to direct.

“This is a lie, and an obvious lie. Here is a man imprisoned unjustly in front of the world for committing the crime of journalism.

“It is an affront, a grievous affront, to the concept of a free press. This is a very dark moment for British liberty. And why? Because, we are told, of national security. That we cannot afford to give a platform to speech the government dislikes for fear that speech might cause political harm.

“Is this a free nation?”

“As the great British subject who lived on the other side of the pond Benjamin Franklin once said, those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither and will soon lose both. We are in grave danger, Your Honour, of becoming those people.

“I implore you to consider the place in history this matter will occupy. If we allow this to continue we will look back upon this case with extreme regret, Your Honour.”

I looked around the courtroom. The reporters and observers weren’t rapt as I’d hoped they’d be. Brackett wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t killing it, either. He was OK.

And if Mike had been giving the statement it would have been a lot better.

Mike was finally looking at me. I gave him as cheerful a smile as I could, and I got a weak one in return.

“I’m really worried about him,” I whispered to Mom.

“It’s such a horrible thing to have happen,” she whispered back. “I can’t even imagine.”

Brackett continued for a bit longer and then he wrapped up the speech…

“And when Mr. Holman was placed in a cell with a mentally unstable prisoner who made an attempt on his life and then, just last night, committed suicide, one must question just what it is the Crown intends.

“We have clearly seen that Mr. Holman is to be silenced by these proceedings. Not solely in this courtroom, Your Honour, but by the charges themselves. And the offer of bail in this matter is of the same character — to escape prison for a time, he must agree to be silenced.

“Well, Mr. Holman does not accept quite so easily. If it is the Crown’s wish to silence him, the Crown must do so in full view of the world, who will know they have made of him a prisoner. He rejects the Crown’s offer of bail under any conditions of silence, may it please Your Honour.”

“So be it,” said Choudhary. “The defendant is remanded to HMP Belmarsh without bail.”

And after a few minutes more, that was it. Mike was led away, and the reporters pressed in with questions. Brackett answered for us, saying all the things you’d expect him to.

It was depressing. We hadn’t made a difference at all. And Mike was no closer to escaping this nightmare.

As we were leaving, I asked Brackett if he could get me in to see him at Belmarsh given what he’d experienced. He said he’d do what he could.

The next day was Saturday, and Mom and I checked out of the Savoy with like a dozen bags between us. It was embarrassing, but the good news is that when I’d texted Colin from Sentinel Network Security to see if he could help us get out of there, he actually showed up in a van and loaded us up.

Colin was a sweetheart. I insisted on buying him lunch at this Caribbean place not far from the new house. He was appreciative, but the food was … I’m not even going to say it.

The really nice places in London, the food’s good. The regular places there, it’s pretty hit or miss. This was a miss.

But after lunch he took us to the house.

Pierce wasn’t lying. It was a dump with a new coat of paint on it, but it was big.

It was red brick, with a big bay window in the front that didn’t really look like it belonged. But all of the other houses on the block had the same thing. Mom joked that we were going to be living in a Benny Hill sketch for a while, which was a funny line, but that wasn’t what hit me.

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, we?”

“Well, I’m not going to leave you alone here, Pauline.”

“Mom? Did you … leave Dad?”

“Pauline, I’m not going to leave your father. But my daughter has a crisis, and so I’m going to be at her side as long as she needs me.”

“But this could — probably will — go on for months.”

“Well, then it’s good that we have a house to live in, don’t you think? You should send Pierce a thank you message.”

I got the impression there was a lot Mom wasn’t telling me. She and I talked about everything, really, except her relationship with Dad.

Dad is a jerk. He’s not abusive to Mom or anything, but he’s always treated her like a trophy wife. She’s a little younger than he is, but Mom is not some bimbo. She’s the one who held our family together when Dad was flying all over the world building the business into what it is, and on top of that she was a high-end commercial lawyer.

I spent most of my childhood in awe of that woman, and it never occurred to me that there was anything unsatisfactory about her life or our family. Later, I realized she’d made lots of sacrifices to sustain everything. But it never occurred to me until that point that Mom was capable of walking away from Dad.

She said she wasn’t, though. And I didn’t have the stones to ask her about that.

I wondered if my situation wasn’t a good excuse — a pretext, I guess — to get Mom out of the house.

She was puttering around the place, trying the faucets, flushing the toilets, turning the lights on and off, and making lots of mental notes about things which needed improvement. Meanwhile, at her urging, I sent Pierce a text telling him the house was fine and that we were checking it out now.

“Sit tight,” he texted back. “There are movers coming in like a half-hour.”

“Movers?”

“Well, I wasn’t gonna buy you a house and not have it furnished for you, was I?”

I laughed.

“No, I guess not,” I messaged back. “Pierce Polk does nothing that isn’t first class.”

“Well, the stuff we bought is pretty mid, but since the place is, too, we didn’t want to go overboard. But the couch is awesome and the beds are memory foam, so there’s that.”

He told me he had a designer pick out the stuff and decorate it from the floor plan and the pics of the place that a pro photographer had taken on Thursday.

“When do you get time to do this stuff?” I asked him.

“I work 20 hours a day, PJ. And this was the easiest thing I’ve done all week. Sasha is Brienna’s designer; she’s right there in London. She nailed all your stuff down in like six hours.”

I told Mom what Pierce had done for us and she just grinned.

“That man can do literally anything,” she said.

“I hope that includes getting Mike out of that prison,” I said.

We were actually within fairly easy walking distance from Belmarsh. It was like twelve blocks away. But Brackett had emailed me that they wouldn’t let us go to see him until the Friday of the next week.

So what was the point? We might as well have stayed on the other side of London.

The other thing that wasn’t incredible was the mosque down the street. I’d Googled it and there was some indication it was a “bad” mosque.

It seemed like this was all a big mistake.

And then the movers came and everything got better.

Yes, Pierce picked out some really nice stuff. He said it was all pretty reasonably priced, but it didn’t really look that way. Everything he’d bought us was a lot nicer than what had been in my apartment in Virginia, and after they’d finished moving us in, the house all of a sudden looked like … something.

But that’s not what changed my attitude.

Because the movers were Pierce’s guys.

I mean, they were his guys. Like, they were the guys who’d been with Pierce in Guyana during the war with the Venezuelans.

I spotted Roman Jefferson as soon as he got off the truck. It’s impossible not to recognize Roman. He looks like a cross between Idris Elba and a middle-aged John Amos, he’s tall and he’s built like a linebacker.

Nobody knows for sure, but the suspicion by many, Mike included, is that it was Roman who took out Nicolae Madiera and ended the war in Guyana. It was almost a 2,000-yard semi-obstructed shot from a tree overlooking the little area next to Kaietur Falls where Madiera was declaring victory, but Roman — at least, the rumor is that it was Roman — nailed it perfectly.

He was a legend in the black-ops community. He’d done three lifetimes’ worth of things he could never talk about. And then Pierce hired him away from the military or the CIA or wherever he’d been.

And Pierce had hired some of Roman’s colleagues, too. The guys who had similarly done impossible things. I’d met a couple of them in Guyana.

They were here with him, unloading furniture from the truck and walking it through the front door.

I knew better than to blurt out Roman’s name on the street. So I waited until he and another guy had placed a couple of overstuffed leather chairs next to the overstuffed leather couch in the den, and then I sidled up to him.

“You’re not Roman today, are you, Roman?” I asked him quietly.

“It’s OK,” he said. “Place got swept for bugs this morning. It’s clean.”

“Oh, good.”

“And to answer your question, call me Donovan on this trip.”

“Nice to see you, Donovan.”

“And nice to see you, too, ma’am,” he said, in a perfect Jamaican accent. “Let me introduce you to my colleague here. This is Handsome Rob.”

His colleague was a very large, very burly and not very handsome Englishman. Handsome Rob’s face was pockmarked with scars and he had a cauliflower ear, plus I noticed that one of his massive forearms had some major burn scars all over it.

“It’s nice to meet you, Handsome Rob,” I said as Mom came over.

“Why do they call you Handsome Rob?” she asked him.

“Why, isn’t it obvious, love?” he deadpanned.

Roman/Donovan explained that Handsome Rob was former SAS, but of late his career path had led him into corrections.

“He works nearby in his straight job,” Roman said.

“For now, at least,” said Handsome Rob. “One never knows where the path may lead, hey?”

“I think that’s right,” I said.

“So you’ll know, ma’am,” he said, leaning in to me, “I’ve got an eye on your man. No one’s gonna bother him where he is. He’s safe, yeah?”

“That’s good to know. Is there any chance I could give you stuff for him?”

“We’ll work it out, love.”

And just like that, Roman and his guys were back in character. They finished unloading the truck, refused our offers of food — Mom was going to order some delivery — and said goodbye.

Roman did leave me a business card. “For emergencies,” he said, “but we’ll see each other again in not too long.”

The whole time the movers were getting us set up, Mom had a notebook out and she was making a big list of things we needed. Bedsheets, silverware, kitchen things, a TV, towels, toiletries, all the stuff you’d make a massive Walmart run for after you moved in somewhere.

But we didn’t have a car, and after the movers left she got all fussy about how we’d make it work without a vehicle.

Meanwhile, I was letting my butt sink into that overstuffed leather sofa Pierce had brought us and wondering how I’d get it home to the place in Florida Mike and I would be living in once this nightmare was over.

It struck me that it would probably be less expensive just to buy another one. But the more comfortable I got on that sofa, the less I cared. I was keeping this thing.

“Mom, come and sit on this couch,” I said, as she fretted about paper towels and hand soap.

So she did.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “This is nice.”

“I’m keeping it. I don’t care what it costs. This is coming home with me when we’re done here.”

“I agree.”

“And look — let’s not worry about going out to the store. We’ll just order everything from Amazon and have it delivered.”

“You don’t want to explore the neighborhood and see what’s around?”

“Well, there’s a big prison, and there’s a forest, and a bunch of houses like this one. This isn’t a very happening part of town, Mom.”

“Well, while we’re here we should at least take in London.”

“Sure. That we can do. But something tells me we aren’t going to like our neighbors any more than they’re going to like us.”

“You don’t think going running around here is a good idea, do you?”

“Sure. Put on your sports bra and leggings and take a jog past the mosque.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

Mom stayed in shape.

So we spent the rest of the day on Amazon ordering an insane amount of stuff for the house, and then I found that the Tesco not far from the house did delivery, so there was the grocery shopping.

We’d be happy little shutins. Pierce had even gotten us set up with wifi.

But no sooner did the Whoosh guy — that’s what Tesco calls their delivery service — show up with a ton of groceries and essentials, but I got a call from Brackett.

“Hey,” I answered as Mom started putting away that first round of purchases. “What’s going on?”

“I have a very serious question,” he said. “Were you absolutely honest with me when you said that Mike hadn’t been out of your sight from the time you landed in London to the time he was arrested?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Then I have another question. Have you been honest with me regarding all telephone conversations he had?”

“Thomas, what’s this about? I’ve hidden nothing from you.”

“The Crown is claiming they have a recording of Mike with Thomason discussing the planting of a bomb at Number 10.”

Hellmarsh, September 21, 2024

For the next week, there was a media firestorm over the tape of Mike and Robby Thomason supposedly plotting to bomb Number 10 Downing Street … and what happened after it was leaked to the public. Brackett had gone in to see Mike about it, and Mike denied ever having that discussion. He said, and I confirmed, to the best of my knowledge, that he had never actually talked on the phone with Thomason at all; the only time he’d ever conversed with Thomason was at that airport lounge at Heathrow when we did the interview.

And from Cyprus, Thomason released a video echoing that and making a full denial he’d ever been involved with bombing anything.

“Piers!” Thomason barked at Stormer on the video, a gorgeous Mediterranean seaside in the background, “Yer so afraid of the people coming to your door to tell you what we think of ya, you had to frame us about a bomb. I don’t need a bomb to sort you out, you bloody wanker!”

I don’t know whether Thomason’s video helped.

It certainly didn’t stop the usual outlets from running away with the story and turning it into a narrative. By Tuesday, Mike was being denounced by celebrities and politicians practically everywhere; Katrina Duvalier, the White House Press Secretary, called Mike a “perfect example of the derangement a certain kind of declining demographic is capable of,” which she refused to defend after Dieter Poocy of Fox News immediately challenged her on it.

And Hillary Clinton said Mike was exactly the kind of person she’d been talking about when she discussed the “basket of deplorables.”

And in Britain, Piers Stormer was decrying the “ugly contagion of the American Right and its unhinged, violent stench of rebellion” having made it to the U.K.

Mom had insisted on taking a run in the neighborhood despite my warning not to. She ended up coming back in an Uber, like an hour later than she said she was going to.

“What happened?” I asked her when she came in. “I was worried sick about you!”

“Why didn’t you call me? How come you didn’t get my text?”

“Because I lost my phone, like an idiot.”

“There was a man following me, and I didn’t want him to see where we live. So I ran to the Tesco and called an Uber to take me home.”

As my sigh of relief melted away at this ominous news, I could hear my phone ringing. It had fallen under the couch. I reached down and picked it up.

Pierce was calling. I answered, and he asked me how I was holding up.

“I feel like I’m living in crazy-town, Pierce,” I said. “This supposed terror tape, it’s a lie. Mike never said any of that. I’m sure of it. Why would he want to?”

“It’s an AI fake,” he said.

“Well, I guess it’s a good one. Everybody seems to believe it’s real.”

He laughed.

“Don’t worry about that. They won’t believe it for long.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“Well, what you should do is check out the Holman Media site in…fourteen minutes.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re releasing a terror tape of our own. And it’s much more shocking than this one.”

I couldn’t help but grin.

“This is gonna be pretty good, huh?”

“Yeah. It should. Oh, and I’m gonna be on Sky News tomorrow night for a half-hour.”

“You are? To talk about Mike’s thing?”

“To talk about the dockworkers’ strike that started last night at midnight. And the cyber breach at the London Stock Exchange which is triggering a colossal selloff in the market today. And the dump the British pound is taking against the dollar. Plus Mike’s thing.”

I hadn’t been paying attention to the financial news, but Pierce wasn’t lying. The FTSE 100, the British equivalent of the Dow, was down more than 8 percent. And amazingly, the pound was trading close to even with the dollar; it had been tanking for three weeks and was now in apparent free fall.

“These are things you know a lot about.”

“Of course. I’m losing a fortune in Britain today. And I’m awfully pissed about it.”

He didn’t sound very pissed.

But a few minutes later, Holman Media released an audio recording which was certain to cause a worldwide controversy. The voices on the recording were pretty clear. One of them was Piers Stormer, and the other was King Charles.

On the recording, Stormer was saying that too many people were flying on planes and if something wasn’t done, there would be no way to reverse climate change. King Charles was agreeing, and he asked whether there wasn’t something that might be done about that.

“Why yes,” Stormer said. “In fact, we have a very good way to discourage air travel. It’s somewhat drastic, but surely effective.”

“I am for whatever means you may have,” said the King.

“A surface-to-air missile,” said Stormer. “Perhaps several. Enough of them, in a short period of time, and people will stop flying altogether.”

“Yes!” said the King. “Brilliant! Spread fear among the populace and they will cheerfully obey.”

It was utterly absurd, of course. But it sure did sound like Stormer and the King.

When Holman Media released it, it was immediately picked up by conservative media in America, mostly in a tongue-in-cheek way. “Are Britain’s Leaders Trying To Kill Their Air Travelers?” The Blaze’s headline read. At PJ Media, the headline was “Holman Media’s Terror Tape Isn’t More Absurd Than the UK Government’s.”

Neville put out a statement proclaiming himself “utterly shocked and dismayed” that Piers Stormer would be contemplating “the murder of his countrymen in their hundreds in the name of climate change.”

It was a “cheeky bit of tongue-in-cheek,” as Simon texted me when he shared the link.

Of course, the hot denials flowed.

Stormer appeared at a podium later that afternoon to bemoan the “low-rent parody” of “a terrorist website in America” which was “giving comfort to those undesirable elements standing against societal order.”

The royal family put out a statement that read, in part, “Clearly the King would not engage in such foolish sophistry as that depicted in the recording in question.”

And then Pierce dropped a video on X taking credit for the deepfake.

“And I did it because the British government has done the same thing,” he said. “They used artificial intelligence to gin up a fake conversation between Mike Holman and Robby Thomason which is just as ridiculous as the one on this recording of mine and announced it publicly to poison the jury pool in Mike’s case. And this I can prove.”

And then, Pierce demonstrated how a commercially-available AI app could be used to generate the deepfake of Stormer and the King. Next, he demonstrated how the same process could create the audio of Mike and Thomason.

“And I’m using the Audiomonster app for these for a reason: it’s what a lawyer at the Crown Prosecution Service named Andrew McClain, used to create the deepfake of Mike and Mr. Thomason which kicked up such a fuss this week.”

McClain, he explained, was a young subordinate of Sybil Courtson-Weill at the CPS. She was the lead prosecutor in Mike’s case,

Pierce then went through a series of screencaps showing that McClain — or someone using his computer at the Crown Prosecution Service’s London office — had gone on the app, uploaded audio recordings of Mike and Thomason speaking and had uploaded a text script. The app did the rest, particularly as McClain tweaked it using the adjustment sliders. Pierce showed how he’d run through several iterations of the recording before getting it just right.

He had all this information, he said, because when Sentinel Network Security had remotely scrubbed Mike’s laptop after it was seized by the police, they’d installed a virus onto the machine that was triggered by efforts to retrieve deleted files — and when the Counter Terrorism Command officer from the London Metropolitan Police leading the investigation into Mike had emailed McClain an update on the arrest, the virus passed to McClain’s machine.

The virus gave the people at Sentinel complete access to everything that happened on McClain’s computer.

And they were monitoring and recording that machine, down to every individual keystroke, in real time.

The video went on for 28 minutes documenting in painful detail that the Holman–Thomason deepfake had come directly from the prosecutor.

“It seems to me that the British government has far bigger fish to fry than to continue pursuing this absurd persecution of my friend Mike Holman,” Pierce said. “If it doesn’t stop, be advised that there are some really amazing revelations to follow.”

Mom and I watched that video with our jaws on the floor.

“This AI stuff is the end of the world,” she said. “It’s the end of truth. Nobody will ever know what’s real and what isn’t again.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but I’ll say this, you might as well fight fire with fire.”

She nodded.

And then my phone started ringing off the hook.

Two days later I was back doing interviews on TV channels and podcasts on both sides of the Atlantic. We’d turned one of the spare bedrooms into a podcast studio so I didn’t have to leave the house, and that was a good thing — after Mom’s episode with the scary man following her as she jogged, we were essentially locked into that house other than when we could have Roman and his guys providing us security to go somewhere. And to watch the house when we were gone.

Because there were people watching the house from the street, and they didn’t look like they were friendly. Roman came over on Wednesday when I called him about that, and he walked over to talk to a couple of South Asian–looking guys who were leaning against a lamp-post near the curb. They left just after that and Roman looked back at us with a smile.

But it didn’t stop the surveillance. People were staring at the house all day, every day. Which was why Roman had a couple of guys in a van parked on the street nearby, and why they’d installed security cameras on the outside of the house covering all the doors and windows on the ground floor.

We weren’t really prisoners, in that we could go places when we wanted, and we did. Mom dragged me out of the house to see some sights, and it was fun. I’d rather have seen them with Mike, but it was good to get my mind off the ordeal for a little while here and there.

I don’t know how I would have managed without her.

And what I found out was that the big media blitz attempting to demonize Mike wasn’t really working with the British people, or at least it wasn’t with a lot of them.

Roman had sent one of his Guyana guys, a serious badass named Charlie who’d been with him in Iraq and some other places he couldn’t really talk about, along as our bodyguard. Charlie didn’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or anything, but with a little examination you could tell he was not a guy you wanted to mess with, and he was serious about being our bodyguard.

And I felt sorry for Charlie, because people kept coming up to us when we’d go on those excursions around London. At the Tower of London, for example, a middle-aged woman in a Nike hoodie sweatshirt came up to me somewhat abruptly and asked me if I was “that PJ woman what’s married to the American prisoner?”

“Yes, I am,” I said, prepared for the worst.

“I have something to say to you,” she said. My heart sank.

“Sure,” I said, in as friendly a tone as I could. “What’s that?”

“God bless and keep you, love,” she said. “It’s a horror what they’ve done with him. You’re in our prayers, and we’re so sorry you’ve had to endure this.”

“Hear, hear,” said a man standing nearby.

“Utterly disgusted with that lot in Westminster,” another lady said. “Be strong, because it won’t last.”

“You aren’t alone,” said another man. “My cousin is in Bedford for demonstratin’. He did bleedin’ nuffink.”

At least it came out as “nuffink.” I’m pretty sure he meant “nothing.”

“Thank all of you,” I said. “It’s been hard, but I know we aren’t alone in this.”

And it drove me crazy, but I started tearing up again and we had to cut the trip short. I was almost bawling by the time we got back to the car.

I was apologizing for being so emotional. Mom would have none of that. “What you’re going through would break somebody weaker,” she said. “But you’re going to be fine. I raised you to be tough and you are.”

“You’re doing great, PJ,” Charlie said from the driver’s seat.

Anyway, on that Friday I was finally able to see Mike again.

He was skinnier and paler than he was when I’d seen him at the Old Bailey, but interestingly enough, he was in considerably better spirits. I peppered him with questions about the dead cellmate, and though he was still pretty freaked out about it he dismissed the whole thing.

“The guy was crazy,” he said. “It was probably bound to happen at some point.”

“But how did he hang himself and you didn’t know?”

“I don’t know, PJ. All I know is when I woke up, he was dead. He’d been talking to himself nonstop for four days, and I’d been ignoring him. It’s gotten to the point where I can sleep through an earthquake. It’s never quiet in that jail.”

I gave him a quizzical look. But it seemed like he was telling the truth.

In any event, he said, things had gotten considerably better afterward. Mike said they moved him to an individual cell in a different building, and he was now at the end of a hallway on the first floor.

“It’s a little quieter,” he said, “and there’s a lot more space. They tell me this was Julian Assange’s cell when he was here.”

He also said there was a guard, whose name was Rob, who was in charge of the wing. Rob told him he’d make sure nothing happened to him.

“You mean Handsome Rob?” I asked.

“Ummm, well … I don’t know that I’d describe him as handsome. Guy looks like he’s been in more than a few fights in his time.”

“Yep. That’s him.”

“You know him?”

I nodded and smiled.

“Well, this is good stuff.”

I was joking with him about what Hillary Clinton had said about him.

“There’s a reason that old bitch couldn’t get elected,” he said.

Then I told him about the friendly reception from the other visitors at the Tower, and it made him smile. Which made me feel really good.

Then he shooed me out of the visitors’ area. Mom and I had decided to go for a nice dinner at an Italian place in Chelsea that night, and Mike said he didn’t want me to be late.

”I sure wish you could come with us,” I said. “You could ask Mom about her marriage.”

“Oh yeah? What’s going on there?”

“She won’t tell me, but I think she’s separating from Dad. And I think it’s over this thing.”

“That’s too bad.”

“There’s a lot I haven’t told you, and I’ll give it to you eventually I guess.”

“PJ, I don’t want you to fall out with your Dad.”

“Might be too late for that.”

“Well, try not to make it worse. When I get out we’ll fix it.”

Abbey Wood, September 30, 2024

After I left Belmarsh that Saturday, things started to get very, very crazy.

We were in the car on the way to Chelsea when my phone rang. The caller ID said Stoke-On-Trent. When I answered it, Robby Thomason was on the other side.

“PJ, love,” he said, “I’m so sorry I couldn’t call you before. I feel terrible about what’s happened to Mike.”

“That’s kind, Robby,” I told him, “but it’s nothing to do with you.”

And yes, I gave him the Jason Statham accent.

“Are you having me on?” he said, chuckling.

“It’s kind of an inside joke with Mike and I. I can do the cockney accent thing better than Mike, but yours is better than mine. I had to do it anyway.”

He laughed.

“My accent’s not that thick, love,” he said. “I can show you some blokes what can’t make themself understood at all.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”

“Listen,” he said, “I want to make sure you’re all right. I been where Mike is, you know, and what ate at me was not knowin’ my family would be OK.”

“I’m fine, Robby,” I said. “I have some pretty good friends, you know.”

“What I hear you got the best,” he said. “If not for my cause I’d be beggin’ for a place in the jungle with him.”

“You hear right. We’re well taken care of.”

“That’s good. But you ought to know that while the people are with you, what’s happening is gonna generate a backlash, yeah?”

“Meaning what?”

“The things that Polk is doin’, they’re havin’ an effect. But it’s ordinary folks that get hit hardest, innit?”

“You’re saying he’s hurting people.”

“Most understand. My phone won’t stop ringin’. They all tell me the people hate Stormer and they blame him for this, not Mike. But that’s not everybody, you know.”

“I’ve been glued to the TV and the internet since this thing started,” I said. “I know what’s being said.”

“I just think you wanna be careful. This is gonna come to a head, an’ Stormer an’ the Establishment is gonna lash out.”

“Robby, I would think they’ll lash out against you more than me.”

“And they will. When I come home they will put me in prison, no question about it. I’m preparin’. I know it’s comin’. But before I come, especially with you goin’ on air like you do, and you’re quite good, love…they might put a target on your back.”

“Well, I’ve lawyered up and I’ve got security, so…”

“Just be careful, hey?”

“I will. You do the same.”

He said goodbye and Mom, who heard the call because I had it on speaker, shook her head.

“Can you imagine being him?” she said. “He’s a marked man by his own government.”

“There’s a lot of that going around, you know.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. And then we hit that restaurant for the best osso buco I’ve ever had.

But the next day, there was another protest that turned ugly, this one in Birmingham. I’m not even sure what touched it off; at this point the list of possible causes was almost endless. Stormer was running around the country making speeches decrying the “pervasive and destructive influence” of a “global rebel consortium” bent on “destroying our democratic order.”

He’d given that speech several times, and at UK News they were laughing at him. Kristie Hodgkins, who Mike had interviewed a couple of times and had written an absolutely scathing piece about his imprisonment a week before, laughingly asked if Marjorie Taylor Greene was coming to Britain to “finish off the American revolution,” and suggested that “our new American masters might do well to stop the rolling blackouts.”

They’d closed the last coal-fired power plant in the UK a month or so before, and through some confluence of weather patterns in Wales and England the Guardian was blaming on “climate change” the winds had become a little less persistent. Seeing as though something like 30 percent of the power grid in Great Britain depended on wind turbines, that unfortunate calming of the winds had left the electric grid starved of energy.

And when Mom went online to pick out stuff for Tesco to deliver, they were out of half the things she wanted.

“We’re going to have to eat out, or get delivery food,” she said. “Our supermarket is a bust.”

It was starting to get weird all over the country. And regardless of Thomason’s call, I actually didn’t think Pierce was responsible for most of it. It seems like Stormer had more or less crashed Great Britain’s economy all by himself.

They’d announced a steel plant in Wales was shutting down as part of a “decarbonization” effort the Indian company that owned the blast furnace was engaged in, encouraged by the government. Three thousand jobs were gone just from that plant closure, and on TV they were debating how much of an impact that was going to have on the community around the plant.

The BBC dismissed it. Sky News said the place was going to become a ghost town. Almost certainly Sky News was right.

Then there was the Israelis taking out a whole host of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders with airstrikes and exploding pagers and all kinds of other things, and that incensed the pro-Palestinian folks in London. At the mosque down the street, on the Tuesday after I visited Mike, there was what looked like a block party; they barricaded the street and there were speakers blasting “the Jews” and demanding that Stormer “stop the genocide.”

Roman called and said he was making sure nothing came to our side of the block.

“I don’t know that it’s a good idea for us to be here,” I said. “It made perfect sense to be close to Belmarsh, but Roman … this is starting to feel like Fort Apache. And I don’t have a gun.”

“I know,” he said. “But you’ve got us.”

The problem was that the next night, somebody threw a brick through our bay window. “Racists OUT!” read the note on the paper wrapped around the brick.

They’d thrown the brick from a moving car, which was a pretty impressive toss.

“There’s no accounting for f**king idiots,” Mom said.

I gave her a look. She’s the one who instilled in me the aversion to swearing, and here she was dropping F-bombs.

Not that I didn’t want to drop one of my own.

Roman’s guys had usually been in the front, but they’d been walking around the property when the brick-throwers did their version of a drive-by shooting.

And no sooner had we covered that window with plywood than something a good bit worse happened.

But this time our little security force was ready.

The house had a back yard bordered by a red-brick wall that was probably five feet high. Roman had put in a security camera above the sliding glass back door, and his people were watching in the van on the street when two men came over the wall late the next night.

They let me see the video later. Those two guys were dressed in black and they were wearing balaclavas over their heads, but had those green headbands with the Arabic writing on them tied around their foreheads.

And both of them had big knives. Not swords; more like Bowie knives.

But Charlie and Buzz, who were in the van watching the camera feeds as Mom and I slept upstairs, saw them immediately and made their way to the front door quickly, let themselves in and took positions in the living room.

When the two attackers were able to pick the lock and slide that door open, Charlie and Buzz waited until they came into the living room and then tazed both of them.

It was Charlie who woke me up.

“Hey,” he said, as I came awake and immediately startled at seeing him.

“What’s the…”

“Everything is OK,” he said, “but we had an incident. I think you should know that we ummm, intercepted a couple of intruders.”

“Intruders?”

“Yeah. Bad guys.”

“This is why it’s so stupid they don’t let you have a gun here.”

“I know. Anyway, it’s taken care of. But Roman’s going to call you later, like in the morning, because I think he’s going to want to talk about some changes.”

“OK. What does that mean?”

“I’ll, uhh, let him talk about that. But I just want you to know that you’re safe. And I wouldn’t tell your mom until later. Like after you talk to Roman.”

“OK.”

“You can go back to sleep if you want. We’ve got reinforcements coming and we’re watching the house.”

You’re probably thinking there was no way I was going back to sleep. You’d be wrong. I knew what Roman and his guys could do, and regardless of what was happening downstairs I had total faith they’d have our backs.

But a little after dawn I did wake up, and I went downstairs to get something to eat. Roman was there.

“You want some breakfast?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said with a big smile. “I heard you had some action last night.”

He smiled.

“It probably didn’t turn out how I would have designed it,” he said, chuckling, “but I gotta hand it to my guys. They’ve got some flair to them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“OK, I’ll tell it to you because I know you can handle it. You were with us at Liberty Point, or at least for some of it.”

“Roman, just tell me.”

“So these two cats who came over the back wall last night? They were your classic old-school assassins. Like in the old Arabic sense, OK?”

“You mean like terrorists?”

“OK, fine, yeah. You’re Mike Holman’s wife and they can’t get to him where he is thanks to Handsome Rob. So they decided they’d get to you.”

“And we’re down the street from a bad mosque.”

“Exactly. That was Pierce’s doing. He figured the location was good because there was stuff nearby and this is close to Belmarsh and even though it’s ugly it’s big and kinda roomy.”

“The place is actually kinda growing on me, in a weird way.”

“Yeah, well, you stick out like a sore thumb here. I’ll be honest, from a security standpoint it isn’t good. I was against it and I was right.”

“You think we ought to go back to the Savoy or something?”

“No. Well, we’ll get to that. But you can’t really stay here. Not after…”

“After what?”

“After these two animals came, obviously. But especially after what Charlie and Buzz did.”

“Which was?”

“They stripped those two assholes down to their birthday suits, tied ‘em up like a couple of hogs, gagged ‘em and left ‘em on the front yard of the mosque. Then there was a little special touch I wouldn’t have recommended.”

“Namely?”

“Carving a Star of David into each of their foreheads with those knives they brought.”

“Oh, shit,” I chuckled, thinking that I’d give Mike the stinky eye if he’d said that.

“It made for a fun video that got uploaded to X a little while ago, for sure. But here’s the thing: I think you’re done here.”

“Probably right. So we’ll just get a hotel.”

Roman shook his head.

“I think it’s time you got out of Dodge.”

“What, like go see Stonehenge?”

“No, like go see Rome. Or Vienna. Or Marrakech or somewhere.”

“You want us to get out of the country?”

“That’s exactly what I want.”

I threw my head back and sighed.

“You don’t want me to ask why, do you?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“You’re definitely cooking me breakfast now.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said with a grin. “How about some flapjacks and a little bacon and eggs?”

“It’s not very British, but I’ll take it.”

Mom must have smelled Roman’s developing feast, because she came down a little later. And we insisted that Roman eat with us.

He wasn’t going to tell Mom everything. She made him. And she had no objection to his command that we take off for a while. In fact, she had an answer for that.

“Let’s go and see the Giseckis,” she said.

Mom’s maiden name was Smithson. But her mom was a Gisecki, and my grandfather was Polish. He was from Gdansk and he’d fled communism in Poland in the 1960’s.

There were still lots of Giseckis in Gdansk. And Mom, being the big genealogy expert who had traced her line, had found them all. She’d been in contact with her cousin Eligia, who was married to a guy who ran an insurance company over there, and as she told us she’d been promising she’d eventually get around to visiting.

“So we’re going to Gdansk?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I think so. You want to meet some of your relatives, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. But Roman, what does this mean about Mike? I’m not going to get stuck, like…”

“PJ, you will see him again,” Roman said.

“Are you sure?”

He smiled, and he stole the last piece of bacon off my plate and laughed as he gobbled it down.

So Mom fired up her laptop and booked two tickets on a flight from Stansted Airport, which was like an hour northeast of where we were, to Gdansk on RyanAir that left that afternoon.

“How long should we pack for?” I asked Roman.

He shrugged.

“Few days, I guess.”

“We’re not coming back here, are we?”

He cocked his head and made a face which told me the answer was no.

“Well, look,” I said. “I know you have a lot to do, but if we’re done here I have a request.”

“Name it.”

“I really want to bring that couch and the two matching chairs to Jupiter so we can have them in the new house, when, you know…”

“When Mike gets there.”

“Yeah! That couch is an absolute God-damned grand slam home run.”

“Pauline!” said Mom.

“Yes, I know, and I’m sorry, Mom. But it’s that good of a couch.”

“It really is,” she admitted.

“Anyway, Roman, I know that’s a real pain in the butt given what else you’re doing, but…”

“Say no more,” he said in his Donovan-the-Jamaican accent. “We’ll handle it, ma’am.”

Charlie brought us to Stansted, He didn’t say anything about saving us. He didn’t have to. I gave him a big hug when he unloaded our bags, and he knew that I appreciated what he’d done.

“It’s my honor,” he said. “And tell Mike when you see him that I appreciate everything he’s done. For all of us.”

“Thanks, Charlie,” I said.

RyanAir is like an Irish version of Southwest Airlines. It cost like $150 for both of our tickets to Gdansk, which was a little more than a two-hour flight. You forget how close together all these places in Europe are compared to back in the States.

And for the next couple of days we had a great time with the Giseckis, who couldn’t have been more excited to meet us. They’re super-nice people, and their English is better than half the folks I talked to in England.

It was a fantastic time.

Right up to the point when I saw on the internet that Mike was dead.

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