News Update

Welcome back to the world of Mike Holman.

If this is your first stop, here’s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay’s bitingly satirical thriller series — four novels (so far) chronicling one man’s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell. Catch up on the whole series, read past episodes, and find links to every book at “The Mike Holman Novels at The American Spectator,” and soon, see the video-novel version of this and the previous books at MikeHolman.com.

We’re now serializing the fourth Mike Holman novel, The Necessary Men, right here at The American Spectator — new episodes dropping every Wednesday and Saturday. The full book goes on sale September 26th at Amazon and the new MikeHolman.com site, and you can pre-order a signed copy right now.

Where we left off: Candela has fled, communism has died, and Diego is now at the helm of a new Cuba, which has paid off Pierce’s grand plan. 

Here are Chapters Nineteen and Twenty, plus the Epilogue, of The Necessary Men.

Chapter Nineteen

Jupiter, Florida — December 22, 2026

 

Sibel Yıldırım had come to the United States as a college student from Turkey. She graduated with a double degree in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Middle Eastern Studies from Penn. That was in 2003. She then got a job as an organizer with the Palestine Action League as its “Gay and Lesbian Alliance” coordinator, which made her somewhat famous in certain circles as the Muslim woman in a hijab speaking at gay-pride events.

At the time, Sibel Yıldırım was an illegal alien, having overstayed her F-1 visa. Rush Limbaugh noted that fact on his show, citing a story he’d found at the Drudge Report, after she had led a parade of drag queens through the Capitol to protest the war in Afghanistan. That was in late 2005. For about a week, there were lots of conservatives screaming about Sibel Yıldırım and demanding to know why she wasn’t being deported.

Then in January of 2006 she married Ari Rosenberg, who happened to be her immigration lawyer. And that was how Sibel Yıldırım got her green card. By 2011, she was a citizen, and she and Ari had taken a quick trip to Splitsville.

By 2013, Sibel Yıldırım had married Abubakr Al-Rahman, a Palestinian activist from Gaza with known ties to Hamas. Al-Rahman managed to get a green card while he was under indictment for material support for terrorism, which didn’t affect his employment with the Muslim-American Friendship League or the Omobba administration’s treatment of his immigration case.

And in 2018, just more than seven years after becoming a U.S. citizen, Sibel Yıldırım was elected to Congress from a district in Philadelphia. She was sworn in as Sibel Al-Rahman.

For the next seven years and change, she’d been one of the most outrageously anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and anti-American members of Congress anybody had ever seen. She’d been arrested several times, the most recent case involving burning an American flag at a Fourth of July “anti-fascist” demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, and each arrest made her a greater and greater hero in the eyes of the American Left.

But in early December, after barely knocking off a guy named Wendell Jackson in a close race for re-election, Sibel Al-Rahman was in Newark at a protest in front of the ICE facility at Delaney Hall. A female protester had tried to stand in front of an ICE vehicle which was attempting to transport three illegal aliens from Colombia (two were cartel thugs, one had sexually assaulted a 12-year-old) to the Newark airport for deportation to Bogota, and ICE officers had picked her up and carried her out of the way of the vehicle, dropping her on the ground in an unfriendly manner.

Sibel didn’t take well to that event. She walked down the street to her vehicle, a Subaru Forester, got behind the wheel, and drove it right to the gate of the ICE facility.

And she ran over an ICE officer who attempted to stop her, breaking the woman’s leg.

Chaos then ensued. A surge of protesters swarmed the gate; shots were fired, though no one was injured, and forty-six people were arrested. But Sibel Al-Rahman managed to escape the scene, having been driven off in a stolen Toyota Camry that was later found torched under an I-95 overpass. News reports dubbed her the “Fugitive Congresswoman,” and she became, virtually overnight, the single most controversial figure in American politics.

And this was more than a sideshow, because by the time Al-Rahman pulled her caper at Delaney Hall, the balance of power in Congress had come into question.

In the Senate, Republicans had actually gained a seat and a 54-46 majority was locked in. But in the House, what looked like a 227-207 GOP majority, with one Libertarian expected to caucus with the Republicans, began to look…

…different.

Four races in California which had been “won” by as many as six points based on the vote count from Election Night melted away following three weeks of vote-counting. The same happened with a race in Wisconsin. A race in Colorado went from 54-45 R to 49.7-49.6 D after 11 days of mail-in ballots being counted. Two races in Arizona went the same way. So did one in Nevada. And when a congressional race in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was also called for the Democrat after 24 days of vote-counting and litigation, the final balance of the House of Representatives was 217-217.

Counting Sibel Al-Rahman as one of the Democrats, that is.

Chad Dudenberger, the comic-book store owner from Vermont who’d become the first Libertarian ever elected to Congress, was now the fulcrum of American politics.

And on December 15, Dudenberger showed up at a press conference on the steps of Capitol Hill with Jeff Hakim, at the time the House Minority Leader, and Dolores Gramsci-Ramos, who was the chair of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, and announced that he was caucusing with the Democrats.

“They’re gonna agree to back my bill for tax-free weed,” said Dudenberger. “That’s what I ran on. It’s the only issue that matters. That and findin’ out who’s hidin’ all the UFO bodies.”

The multiple questions asked of Dudenberger by the Washington media, which came immediately after, were not answered well. Gramsci-Ramos called an end to the spectacle by announcing that Dudenberger was getting an assignment to the House Oversight Committee so that he could help to uncover the answers to “pressing questions the American people want answered.”

And in a later interview that day, without Dudenberger present, Gramsci-Ramos announced that her first hearing as the chair of the House Oversight Committee was going to be about violations of the Logan Act with respect to Cuba.

Speaking of Cuba, I hadn’t been back there since Diego’s installation as the country’s interventor. PJ and I were hard at work on the book, and I’d been doing a lot of media interviews about PGFI’s work in turning over the regime. The thing was that Diego and the team he brought with him, which was mostly Cuban exiles, a lot of Cuban dissidents who’d been fished out of the prisons and immediately given jobs working for TODO on the governmental side of the new administration – the public position was that Cuba was getting out of politics for a while, but there were still unavoidable things that had to be handled – and the Cuban Army guys who’d attached themselves to Diego as the best thing going, were taking over and doing a pretty good job of it.

Trent was our big administration guy at PGFI. He had our end handled. Stan, with his rum distillery under construction and his joint venture with the Uribes cranking up, was more involved in Cuba than I was. And Marisol had gone through Melissa to get to Kaylee Russo – who was the executive producer of the Holman Media podcasts – and score a job as its Cuba correspondent. She was a little rough around the edges as on-air talent, at least at first, but Marisol made up for that by making herself a bird dog.

I’ll take a little credit for it, because I did give her some lessons on how good stories get told in media, at least within the context of the book I was writing. Marisol definitely paid attention. She was sniffing out some terrific anecdotes about the changes in Cuba.

Like, for example, the X-ray machine which made it to San Nicolás de Bari, southeast of Havana. The local doctor had been diagnosing broken bones by feel since the last X-ray machine had gone on the fritz a decade earlier; all of a sudden, the medical clinic in that little town finally had the basic equipment they needed. Or the youth baseball league in Mariel, which was finally able to put together a real schedule because the lights on the fields could stay on at night. Or the fish markets, which were suddenly robust and full of catch because the fishermen had gas and outboard motors again rather than having to row out on the water and row back.

Or the dissidents who’d been in prison for decades, in deplorable conditions, getting to see a new Cuba full of hope, opportunity and activity.

Marisol was doing little podcast segments a couple of times a day in between the stuff she was doing at TODO’s headquarters, which had set up shop in Candela’s presidential palace. They had her serving as a translator, but she was also sort of plugging in wherever Diego needed her. He texted me and said she was a hustler, and that he couldn’t live without her.

When I heard that, I asked her if she was getting any sleep.

“I don’t need sleep,” she said. “Who can sleep with everything going on?”

Hank had set up shop in Havana with his app company. They took up the top floor of the Gran Manzana Kempinski Hotel a couple of blocks from El Capitolio, and they’d hired a bunch of Cubans to help build out TODO’s reconstruction portal. It was built off a combination of Conduit and the TODO app that had sprung from the comms app, with elements of RKTech built in. You’d take pictures of your house so that the app could construct the floor plan, and then particular photos of damage that needed to be repaired, and you’d upload that to your TODO account, and the app would sort you into an “aid bucket” – that was the English term Hank’s team had set up – which either would offer you a grant for repairs or reconstruction, or a loan (generally for smaller repairs), or a full-on buyout of your property if it was damaged beyond repair. And the app would show you several AI-generated options of what your place would look like once it was finished; if you agreed, TODO’s work crew would already have the building materials, fixtures, or whatever in hand when they made it to your house.

And that happened on a schedule which was faster than anybody in Cuba could imagine. Especially with the Cubans pouring back into their country to take part in the rebuilding.

But it was more than that. Trumbull’s Department of Homeland Security had identified Cuba as the country of choice to provide asylum to migrants from all over Latin America who applied to come to the U.S., and those asylees who were being deported were getting recruited by TODO to come to Cuba.

“And it’s ramping up,” said Hank, talking about TODO’s reconstruction portal, “even though we had a lot of trouble early on.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked him.

“So the straight-up way you’d access this portal is that you’d put in your name and address, and from that information all of the public-records stuff would populate a lot of the forms – zoning, square footage, the topography of your lot, all of that. That’s what RKTech does in America, right? Except in Cuba, they don’t want to do that.”

“Why? They’re worried about going on a government list or something, right?”

“Exactly. These people think that putting their house in for a grant or a loan for repairs would be tantamount to complaining about the regime, and so they don’t want any record of what they’re doing.”

“Yeah, that’s not rational,” I said, “but I guess it’s not altogether crazy, either.”

“Right. So we built this amazing portal that could get people plugged into orders for building materials, work crews coming in, the financing, the design, all of it. And we put up billboards all over Havana and the other cities, and all we got was a trickle of people as early adopters. Until we let folks sign into this thing anonymously, and then the flood came in. They’ve all got nicknames like MamaBala571, and ElTigreBueno, and TODOFan016. Nobody uses their real name.”

“But you still have their address, though. It’s not like…”

“It’s psychological. Maybe it’s dumb, but why fight it? We don’t know what these poor people have been through.”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

The other thing Hank was involved in was that his company had built an app for TODO that did job testing based on general knowledge and skills and personality traits. They were getting people coming into testing centers they’d set up around the country, and TODO was training people who’d applied for jobs and then tested into them.

“It’s busy as hell,” he said. “This country is freakin’ energized. They told me Havana used to mostly shut down after dark the last few years. Not anymore. It’s not just that people are drinking and partying all night; they’re working. All of these people have two or three jobs. They’re making money hand over fist, and a lot of them have never had a pot to piss in.”

“If they didn’t have relatives in the U.S. or somewhere sending them cash,” I said, “it would have been impossible for them to make money. Unless they were with the Party, I guess.”

“Yeah, well, those flights to Madrid and Barcelona are pretty full. The commies are buggin’ out with whatever they can carry. Nobody even misses the loot, because it’s small potatoes compared to what Cuba is starting to generate.”

Then he told me the story that seemed to wrap up what Cuba was becoming.

“So in the building across the street from the hotel,” Hank said, “and this used to be a really cool structure 75 years ago, but it looks like it’s going to fall on top of you if you walk in, there is this coffee and pastry shop that opened. It’s called La Sierra Maestra, after the mountains in the southeast where all the coffee used to come from. They make it a point that all of their stuff is locally sourced and Cuban. And here’s the interesting part – there’s a line out around the block!”

“Hank, Cubans waiting in line isn’t something new.”

“Yeah, I know that. Which is what makes this so much fun. They’re not waiting in line because there’s no coffee or pastelitos. They have tons of both. They’re waiting in line because their stuff is so freaking good that everybody in central Havana is beating a path to their door.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

“You go get in that line, and the folks will tell you that getting stuff which is actually good, rather than just edible, that comes from real, fresh ingredients, and it’s actually available to Cubans rather than foreigners in these five-star hotels, is, like, this impossible miracle. It’s an emotional thing for them, man. That Cubans are capable not only of producing great stuff but that they can do it to serve each other. The pride in this deal is so thick you’ve got to saw through it.”

“Sounds like these guys need a drive-thru,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I talked to the owner and I’m gonna put some money behind him and see if we can’t get him to put up locations all over Havana. And believe me, his place would make it in Florida.”

Hank’s experience in Havana was strange but positive. Hal’s mission there, helping Brigante restructure the Cuban Army into a smaller, more focused fighting force rather than a monopoly corporation where the country’s private sector should have stood, had a different character.

There was resistance among the officer corps to the new reality, because essentially if you were a FAR officer before, you could wet your beak in both ponds. Now you were having to choose, and it was happening at a time when Cuban military people were getting processed out of their overseas deployments with once-friendly regimes like in Venezuela and Peru.

Pierce had smoothed a lot of that over by just writing a check to give all the Army people who wanted to be professional soldiers a sizable raise, and the ones who’d joined the Army so they could get a good job working in the things the Army owned were getting discharged and put to work.

But then there were the intelligence services, the DSE, which was internal, and the DI, which was external. Hal and a commission of folks from Sentinel Security as well as a team of Cubans, mostly dissidents, were doing a deep dive through the DI’s files. He kept telling me that the things they were uncovering were going to change a lot of what people thought about history, politics, and even culture.

“Care to elaborate?” I asked him.

“Not quite yet,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t think the world is ready. But I will say this – if this Dolores Gramsci-Ramos woman wants to make trouble on the Oversight Committee out of our project, I’m happy to fire the first shot.”

And he did, after I hooked him up with Flip Johnson at Holman Media.

A couple of days later, Manny Menendez, who was Gramsci-Ramos’s chief of staff, became famous in a way he didn’t want to be. Flip had posted an exposé based on the DI’s files that showed continuing contact and influence between Menendez and the Cuban intel agency going back 18 years, from the time he’d traveled to Cuba as a recruit of the Venceremos Brigade – which was a communist training program the Cubans ran for left-wing American activists going all the way back to the 1970s. Menendez’s name was all over the files, and Flip cut loose the raw documents as part of his exposé, and by the end of the week the Justice Department had indicted him under FARA.

And that begged the question whether the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee wasn’t herself a Cuban intel asset.

Which Gramsci-Ramos denied.

But then, something unusual happened, and Flip was tipped off to it. A safety camera on a delivery truck recorded an accident in a warehouse in Queens, which wasn’t in Gramsci-Ramos’s district but rather next door in her best buddy Naomi Yanko-Munsch’s. It seemed that the truck’s pallet jack clipped a stack of cardboard boxes labeled as “Fair Trade Coffee Table Books” in the warehouse, and tumbling out of the rip were thousands of copies of a Spanish-to-English pamphlet with Fidel’s face on it, extolling the virtues of Third Worldism as it fought racist capitalism and American imperialism.

The driver emailed the MP4 file to Flip, who marveled at both its high definition and cinematic quality, and then Flip started digging and found out the warehouse was leased to an LLC with Manny Menendez as its registered agent – something that had been the case since before Gramsci-Ramos hired him as her chief of staff.

Menendez’ lawyer refused comment about the warehouse and the pamphlets, and the left-wing media outlets pretended there was no story there. But when a reporter for the Daily Signal hit up Gramsci-Ramos about that warehouse, she went utterly ballistic.

“I have never set foot in that warehouse in my life!” she said.

Except an intern at Holman Media, a college kid at Georgia Tech named Allison something, went and found a five-year-old photo of Gramsci-Ramos at a Marxist Union of America fundraiser in that warehouse, standing in front of that exact stack of pamphlets. She and Menendez were grinning and holding one up for the camera.

You’d think this would have been enough to make Gramsci-Ramos go away with respect to Cuba and the stupid Logan Act. And you’d be wrong.

Flip called me after he ran that photo at the site.

“Hey, what about the other stuff you’ve got?” he said. “Should we put that out there?”

“Look,” I said. “At some point it starts to look like you’re just a hatchet man working for me, and I know you’re far more than that.”

“Nah,” he said. “A hatchet man puts out lies. I’m just lettin’ the people see who this is.”

“All right, fair enough,” I said. “But let’s hold off on this other bombshell of ours. We’ll want something big if she really does want to come after PGFI with these dumb hearings.”

“You’re the boss,” he sighed.

It got crazier and crazier. The week before Christmas, Diego was invited to speak at the U.N. in New York.

And Gramsci-Ramos and the city’s mayor, another Marxist Union of America member named Borat Madmani, held a press conference in which Madmani threatened to arrest Diego under the Logan Act if he came to New York. Yanko-Munsch was there as well, and so were three other MUA members who’d just been elected to Congress. They all had New York Yankees hats on, which apparently was an attempt to pander to baseball fans in the city who’d had their hearts broken repeatedly by Diego’s exploits on the mound for the Red Sox.

The attorney general immediately put out a statement assuring the nation that Madmani had no jurisdiction over the Logan Act, that he had no power to arrest anyone, and even if those two problems didn’t exist, Diego was an acting head of state of a foreign country and as such would be immune from any jeopardy under the Logan Act.

Dudenberger was doing Rogan’s podcast the next day, and he got asked about what he’d gotten himself into aligning with these people.

“See,” Rogan asked him, “everybody thought that you’d caucus with the Republicans as a Libertarian. I mean, the Democrats are, like, literally communists. What’s a Libertarian doing hangin’ around with commies?”

“Gettin’ to the bottom of the UFO thing, that’s what,” said Dudenberger.

“Wait – Michaelson didn’t promise you that?”

John Michaelson was the outgoing Republican House Speaker.

“Well, yeah, but… he acts like it’s not important. And he told me that tax-free weed is dead in the water on the House floor.”

“Well, because it is.”

“It’s what I ran on, bro. Besides, I made a promise. And I’m a man of my word.”

“This might be a mistake, you know,” Rogan said.

And then, Diego was in New York to speak at the U.N. And that was something. We were watching it at PGFI’s offices; Melissa had gotten Cuban sandwiches delivered from Café Vincennes in Little Havana for the occasion.

Diego stood behind the lectern in the General Assembly hall, in the same gray seersucker suit he’d worn on the Capitolio steps, and I watched him take a second before he spoke, the way he always did before a big pitch, like he was finding the rubber with his foot.

“Mr. Secretary-General. Delegates. Members of the press,” he began. “I want to thank you for the invitation to speak here today, because I understand that for some of you, it was not an easy invitation to extend.”

A ripple of laughter, uncomfortable in places.

“I know there is a mayor in this city who has announced, on television, that he intends to have me arrested the moment I set foot on American soil. Mayor Madmani, if you are watching – and I assume you are, because you never miss a camera – I am staying at the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue, room 1407. The doors are unlocked. Come and get me. Bring your friends from the Marxist Union of America. Wear your Yankees hats. I will even sign a baseball for you before your officers put the cuffs on, because I understand you do not get to see very much winning where you come from.”

That got a real laugh, and a few scattered claps from delegations that clearly hadn’t meant to.

“But he will not come,” Diego went on, “because he knows, as I do, that a man cannot be arrested under the Logan Act for the crime of being the head of state of the country he represents. And that is what I am today. Not a politician. Not an ideologue. The interventor of the Republic of Cuba, appointed to hold that country together with both hands until it can stand on its own.”

He paused, let the room settle.

“I am here to tell you something, and then I am going to say something else, and you will not like either one.

“The first thing is this. Cuba is withdrawing, effective today, from every political committee, council, working group, and caucus of this organization to which it currently belongs. The Human Rights Council. The Special Committee on Decolonization. The G77. All of it. We are not doing this because we do not care what the world thinks of us – we have spent sixty-seven years caring far too much what the world thought of us, performing a version of ourselves for cameras and delegations while our own people starved in the dark. We are done performing. Cuba does not have the time, the money, or the appetite for politics right now. We have a country to rebuild, and every hour our people spend voting on resolutions about someone else’s border dispute is an hour they are not spending running clean water to a town that hasn’t had it in fifteen years.

“So we are taking a leave of absence from the business of politics – all of it, ours and everyone else’s – until we are standing on our own feet again.

“I did not come here today to participate in what this body does. I came to tell you Cuba is stepping outside of it, and to say that we are, for the first time in six decades, genuinely open – open for trade, open for investment, open for tourists, open for anyone who wants to come see what a free people can build when nobody is stealing what they build.”

Somewhere in the back of the hall, even watching on TV, I could feel the Cuban delegation’s own old guard – the handful of Candela-era diplomats who hadn’t gotten out in time and were still, technically, credentialed – shifting in their seats.

“Now. The second thing.

“I did not want to be standing in front of you today as the leader of anything. I wanted, thirty years ago, to be a boy who grew up to pitch baseballs, and Cuba’s government decided that a boy’s dream was a threat to the state, and so I had to leave my own country in the hold of a boat to go chase it somewhere else. I have hardly lived one day of my adult life inside the nation of my birth, because the men who ran it decided that my ambition belonged to them and not to me. That is the plain, ordinary cruelty of what you call communism, and I would ask every delegate in this hall who still defends that system to sit with the fact that it took a five-year-old’s dream and treated it as contraband.

“And when the time finally came to help my country, after sixty-seven years, it did not come through this body. It did not come through any of your councils or your resolutions or your special rapporteurs. It came because a private American businessman and a journalist had to lie their way onto a beach in Gibara, in the dead of night, because that was the only way in. Let that sit with you. In the twenty-first century, freeing ten million people required a smuggling operation.

“I am also aware that certain governments are unhappy that the mines and surveillance installations they built quietly across my country are now being run, honestly, by a company that pays its workers, obeys its contracts, and does not disappear anyone. If the government of the People’s Republic of China wishes to file a formal protest about the disposition of its nickel and cobalt concessions in Moa, I would be glad to accept it – right after they explain what happened to Simon Lim. Mr. Lim spent billions of his own dollars trying to bring food, medicine, and electricity to the people of a country he was not even born in, because he believed decent people should not have to live like this. I will let this body ask his government why that made him a target, instead of a hero.”

The Fox News camera hit on Essie, standing in the gallery, her hand over her mouth.

“So. That is what I came to say. Cuba is stepping out of your politics, and Cuba is open for business. Do with that whatever you like. I have a country to go rebuild, and unlike some of you, I intend to actually get something built before I come back here to talk about it again.”

He didn’t wait for applause. He gathered his notes, nodded once to the Secretary-General, and walked off the dais while half the room was still deciding whether to clap.

“Holy shit,” said Trent. “That was…”

“Fuckin’ awesome,” said Stan.

“I mean, I just love them as a First Couple,” said Melissa. “She’s sooo glamorous and, like, elegant. And he’s a leader. Y’know?”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“And it’s pretty cool that Essie is Hispanic and Diego is black. That sort of brings all of Cuba together, don’t you think?”

“They’re both Hispanic, Melissa,” I said.

“What?”

“They’re both Hispanic. What you’re trying to say is that Essie is white.”

“Oh my God. I mean, you’re right, but like… wait, am I the racist in this room?”

“No,” said Trent. “You’re just too recent a college graduate.”

Melissa shrank in her seat. Then the phone rang. It was PJ.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a subpoena, but it’s… you’re being called to testify at a House Oversight Committee hearing on, it says, ‘actions of Americans in Cuba in flagrant violation of the Logan Act.’”

Chapter Twenty

Washington, D.C. — January 7, 2027

 

The 120th Congress of the United States of America convened under, as Ben Shapiro labeled it, “a cloud of disgrace.”

He wasn’t wrong. As we watched it, Sibel al-Rahman was in the House chamber with 434 other elected members of Congress. They’d managed to sneak her into the chamber through the basement tunnels despite the U.S. Marshals covering the Capitol grounds. Trumbull had given a 90-minute speech that morning, screaming about how absolutely disgusting – “filthy” was the word he used – it was that a federal fugitive who’d nearly caused an ICE officer to lose her leg was about to give the Democrats political power.

And Jeff Hakim, who was set to take over as the House speaker, had promised he was going to impeach Trumbull. But the impeachment wouldn’t be first; first would be the Logan Act hearings starring yours truly.

I had an entire team of lawyers and lobbyists working behind the scenes for weeks to call this thing off, but we decided it would be bad optics for me to outright refuse to testify. They would have just subpoenaed me anyway. I was going to have to go to Capitol Hill and let Dolores Gramsci-Ramos and her friends berate me for most of a day.

And I knew that if this thing went according to the chalk, particularly after the way Hakim and Gramsci-Ramos had stacked House Oversight in the new Congress, it was unavoidable, regardless of what I said or didn’t say at the hearing, that they’d vote on a criminal referral to the Justice Department for violating the Logan Act.

It wouldn’t go anywhere; Tim White, the attorney general, had already said there was no evidence that PGFI had done anything in Cuba that was fundamentally different – we had rendered humanitarian aid and done private-sector commercial deals with various Cuban entities, and had made no government policies that anyone could identify – than the various leftist NGO’s sending people to Cuba had done.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was they were going to get their pound of flesh, and forever after the hearing they were going to call me a criminal. And they were going to say the same thing about Pierce and Diego, but they couldn’t get to Pierce or Diego.

I was the guy they could get to.

And I told PJ, as I watched the House chamber prepare the vote to make Hakim the speaker, that I felt like all of these shenanigans were aimed at me.

“It’s like there is this demon out there on the water,” I said. “I can’t see it yet, but it’s coming for me. And this bullshit on the TV? It’s like the demon’s putting his shoes on.”

“That’s a little dramatic, honey,” she said. “I mean, I’ll allow it and all, but I think you should be happy. Whatever they do, it won’t amount to anything. And the president is going to get it a lot worse than you will, so, y’know… by this weekend it’ll be over.”

The roll call vote began. Al-Rahman, the federal fugitive facing a host of charges including domestic terrorism and the attempted murder of a federal officer, stood when her name was called – early in the process, as she was one of the “A’s” – and yelled “HAKIM!”

And the entire Democrat caucus stood up and cheered.

The cameras panned to the other side of the aisle. Most of the Republicans sat slack-jawed. Billy Ray Hammonds, a freshman Republican from Alabama, jumped from his seat and made for Al-Rahman; several of his colleagues managed to catch him before he could do any damage. Hammonds’ outrage was thus restricted to some very audible choice words I won’t repeat.

And when Chad Dudenberger stood to announce his vote for Hakim, it was obvious he wasn’t enjoying his chosen affiliations.

The final count was exactly what everyone expected: 218 for Hakim, 217 for Michaelson.

Then there was the mass swearing-in of the members, and there was Al-Rahman taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Fox News had Newt Gingrich on as part of their coverage, and he was beside himself. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “Here you have somebody who almost killed a federal law enforcement officer who was doing her duty to support and defend the Constitution by deporting criminal illegal aliens, and she just swore that oath that everybody knows is false, and there is nothing anybody can do about it because her party stands by her. For sheer political power. That’s it.”

“He’s right,” said PJ.

“Of course he’s right,” I snapped.

Hakim started his speech and promised that he would lead a Congress that enforced accountability for the “lawlessness of the Trumbull administration.”

“That’s it,” I said. “I can’t look at another second of this shit.”

I got about as far as the kitchen. I’d poured myself a glass of water and was standing at the sink looking out at the bay, trying to let the knot in my stomach loosen a little, when I heard PJ yell from the other room.

“Mike! Get in here!”

I didn’t run, but I didn’t dawdle either. By the time I got back to the couch, the chamber was in chaos – not the orderly, gavelled kind of chaos Congress usually manages, but real chaos, the kind where the anchors stop finishing their sentences.

Two U.S. Marshals in windbreakers were moving up the center aisle, and behind them, Capitol Police were doing crowd control on a knot of members who’d surged out of their seats to see. Al-Rahman was still standing near her chair – she hadn’t tried to run, hadn’t tried to hide; she was just standing there with her chin up like she’d been waiting for this exact moment since Delaney Hall.

“Sibel Al-Rahman,” one of the Marshals said, and even through the TV speakers I could hear how flat and procedural his voice was, like he was reading a parking ticket, “you’re under arrest.”

She didn’t fight the cuffs. She just started talking, loud, pitched for the cameras rather than the room.

“Abolish ICE!” she shouted, and a knot of the MUA members near the back took it up like a call-and-response. “Allahu Akbar! You cannot silence the people!”

Nobody on the Democrat side was cheering anymore. I watched the camera catch Hakim at the dais, his face doing something complicated – not quite regret, not quite satisfaction, something in between that told me he already knew exactly how this clip was going to run on every network for the next forty-eight hours and there was nothing he could do about it now.

The marshals walked her out through the well of the House, past members who wouldn’t look at her and members who couldn’t stop looking at her, and the chant kept going, fainter and fainter, until the doors swallowed it.

“They let it happen right there,” PJ said quietly. “On the floor. In front of God and C-SPAN and everybody.”

“That was the whole point,” I said. “They needed the vote. They got the vote. Now they let the marshals do their job, and by tomorrow they’ll act like they were appalled the entire time.”

I opened the sliding glass door to the backyard, dodging Robby, Thor, and Sancho as they stampeded out to play.

And then I was on Capitol Hill.

Luckily, I wasn’t the first to speak. And I also wasn’t a sitting duck. In fact, I’d lit something off that was guaranteed to turn Gramsci-Ramos’s hearing into an even bigger circus than that fiasco she and her pals had put on at the swearing-in.

It was a video. More like a highlight video, actually, because there were 22 different clips in it.

One was shot in Gibara. It was from the day we were setting up for Diego’s homecoming there, when we’d found those waterlogged cardboard boxes under the tarps at the ruined warehouse by the pier. I haven’t told you what was in that video that caused poor Harvard Forklift Girl such immeasurable emotional trauma; that girl might not have had a single item of useful information in her head, but she knew damned well how bad the optics were of hundreds of boxes of the book From Each to Each, by Dolores Gramsci-Ramos, sitting under a tarp in the ruins of a warehouse in communist Cuba.

Next to boxes containing T-shirts celebrating the Atlanta Falcons’ victory in Super Bowl LI.

We ended up counting 247 boxes of Gramsci-Ramos’s book in that warehouse in Gibara that day. At 30 books a box, it was just more than 7,400 copies. And when TODO went through and started inventorying government warehouses in other cities and towns throughout Cuba, her books were found, in various quantities, in 21 other places.

There were almost 150,000 copies of From Each to Each stashed in Cuba, seven years after she’d written it as a predicate for her 2020 presidential campaign. She’d even won the New Hampshire primary before her campaign fizzled.

The folks at Holman Media had compiled that video into one highlight clip that ran about three and a half minutes, and it led the front page of the site that morning. Flip Johnson’s story talked about the fact that there’s nothing illegal about writing a book and selling it to whoever will buy it, but this is the preferred way politicians get bribed in America today, and the obvious main question is why these books were sitting in warehouses throughout Cuba, of all places.

So as I hopped into the back of the Tahoe Victor was driving that would take me from the Hay-Adams Hotel to Capitol Hill, I was scrolling on my phone and watching X catch fire. There were a lot of reactions from people asking when the hearings on Gramsci-Ramos and her treason were going to take place, along with the expected squawking about how this was Mike Holman trying to distract from his violation of the Logan Act.

Nothing very illuminating there, I judged.

And then, I was at the table as Gramsci-Ramos gaveled in the hearing. She gave a long-winded, utterly stupid and dishonest rant about sovereignty and American imperialism and how what PGFI and TODO had done displaced and toppled a popular, legitimate government. She said this was an illegal thing for a private company to have done, and that neither the American nor the Cuban people had been asked to vote on the “counter-revolution” we had staged.

It went on and on, and finally it ended. But like I said, I wasn’t the first one to testify.

Burro was.

He’d caught me before the idiocy started and shook my hand.

“Hey,” he said, “you know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished. You guys are heroes. Everybody knows it but these people.”

“I hope that’s true,” I said. “But if this is all the suffering that comes from what we did, I’ll say it was a win that came cheap.”

“I agree,” he said with a chuckle.

Gramsci-Ramos called on him with ice in her voice. That was sort of a famous thing with her. She was an idiot, a true political dunce whose rise was inexplicable to both the Right and Left, other than that it could be attributed to the sheer volume of media appearances and noteworthy/notorious things that came out of her mouth. But the one thing Dolores Gramsci-Ramos had, in prodigious amounts which she managed to monetize within her own party, was vitriol.

She was the meanest woman in American politics. It worked for her. People stopped resisting her because she would make any conflict so unpleasant that nobody could sustain it.

You’d think that wouldn’t constitute political talent, but it did. The old Twain quote resonates: never argue with a fool; bystanders often can’t tell the difference. Nobody made out well in a conflict with Gramsci-Ramos because she never stopped screaming, and you either looked weak for having given up or you inevitably descended to her level.

But Burro was up for at least a limited round with her. He opened his speech with a few entirely insincere words of bipartisanship and a hopefulness that the 120th Congress would be remembered for the productive cooperation on substantial issues that lay ahead. He gave that in a dry tone which masked the sarcasm that lay underneath, and then he moved on to the hearing.

“I must admit that I’m confused about today’s proceedings,” he said, “because no one in the administration, at least not to my knowledge, has voiced any concerns that Mr. Polk, Mr. Maceo, Mr. Holman, or anyone else affiliated with the Polk Global Freedom Initiative or the TODO de Cuba company has departed from U.S. policy toward Cuba. We gave them a waiver from our trade embargo for the purposes of hurricane relief, and to the best of my understanding, they’ve followed the terms of that waiver.

“Now, the Cubans have made Mr. Maceo a de facto head of state, and there is nothing inappropriate about that. After all, he is a native Cuban citizen as well as a naturalized U.S. citizen, and he’s also the CEO of the TODO de Cuba company. It’s true that TODO is something new – a corporate entity which has essentially become a general contractor for an entire country. But that’s still within the realm of private-sector activity and hurricane recovery; they’re not spending American tax dollars, and they aren’t doing anything counter to U.S. policy toward Cuba.

“In short, there is no good reason why we should be here today. But this morning, thanks to a report by Holman Media which seems to be making waves online, we got a glimpse into the bad reasons why this hearing was called. Madam Chair, would you object to me playing the video for this committee?”

“I do object,” she said. “That is…”

“Madam Chair,” James Cumberland, the Kentucky Republican who’d been the committee chair in the previous Congress, cut in. “You might as well let him play it, because every one of us is going to introduce it into the record.”

I saw a staffer rush up and whisper in her ear, and her face seemed to fall.

“Very well,” she said.

The clip played, and Burro smiled at Gramsci-Ramos.

“What I hope comes out of this hearing is an answer to a little different question than is on the agenda,” he said, “but it’s one I think the American people would most want to know. Why is your book so popular in the warehouses of Cuba, Madam Chair?”

“That’s enough!” Gramsci-Ramos screamed, banging the gavel as laughter burst forth from the audience. “Mr. Secretary, you’ve been in enough of these hearings to know that you aren’t the one asking the questions of me. I ask them of you!”

“Well, by all means, then,” said Burro, “ask away. I can even answer my own question for you, though I doubt you’ll like that answer.”

She brushed that off.

“Secretary Burro, did you direct Mr. Holman and Mr. Polk and their confederates to overthrow the government of Cuba?”

“Well, Madam Chair, I’m only the secretary of state. I don’t have the power to direct anyone to do anything like that. You’d probably have to ask that question to the president. I can say that I expect he would tell you that our administration is delighted to have a new regime in charge of Cuba, one with whom we can build a productive, prosperous, peaceful friendship. And I’ll also say that I would have fantasized about a scenario that such a reality could have been created with a very minimal loss of life.”

Dolores Gramsci-Ramos turned three different colors, and she unleashed a torrent of vituperative abuse on Burro, accusing him of abetting fascism on the peaceful island nation of Cuba, calling Pierce, Diego, and me stooges of the Trumbull administration, accusing the State Department of “lying” to the Cubans and letting us “steal” LCTC from Peter Chang. It went on well past her allotted time, and finally, Cumberland started yelling at her that she was abusing her power as committee chair.

That seemed to settle her down, or at least the staffers whispering in her ear as Cumberland was berating her did, and then things came back down to normal.

I was looking at my phone, judging the reactions on X to what was happening. My guess was that Gramsci-Ramos’s staffers had been doing the same thing.

The committee then questioned Burro for an hour or so, and I noticed most of the questions were not about the Logan Act. Even the Democrats were straying from the subject.

Then it was my turn.

Gramsci-Ramos admonished me before I opened my testimony that she expected truthful answers because contempt of Congress was on the table following my stunt that morning.

So I took the written testimony that the lawyers and I had agreed on and made a theatrical showing of dumping it into the trash can beside the witness table.

“Well then, Madam Chair,” I said, “let me start by saying you should go ahead and have your vote post haste, because the contempt I have for this Congress, and I imagine I’m with the majority of the people in America in saying this, is utterly without bounds.

“This hearing is evidence of, as a very wise man said to me today, no good deed going unpunished. What we did in Cuba through the Polk Global Freedom Initiative was to provide humanitarian assistance to people who haven’t had a full day of electricity in years, if not decades. In Gibara, the town I directly helped with, they’d been most of a week without running water because a basic repair clamp for a broken water main was too much trouble for the Cuban regime to produce. We fixed that problem in three hours. We built piers, we paved roads and airport runways, we repaired and constructed power systems, we distributed agricultural equipment, we created capital investment, created jobs and small businesses, gave people an opportunity to communicate with the outside world without interference.

“We did things most people on this planet, and especially Americans, and including you, Madam Chair, take absolutely for granted. And in a matter of months, we measurably improved the lives of more than nine million people.

“Now, as I gather from your rather long-winded angry fusillade a few minutes ago, you’re accusing me of overthrowing Manolo Candela’s dictatorship in Cuba. Well, maybe you’re right. But I just told you what I did, and it might not be an exhaustive list, but everything that PGFI did in Cuba fit into the same category: humanitarian aid. Now, you should stop and think about something – if that activity brings down a regime, then exactly what kind of a regime are we talking about?

“As for this supposed stunt that the folks at Holman Media are accused of pulling, that’s what’s known as an act of journalism, Madam Chair. There is nothing dishonest in it, and I resent, on their behalf, your implication otherwise. In fact, I was there in Gibara when we opened those boxes and saw thousands of your books under a bunch of tarps. They’d been there for years. That regime didn’t even bother to distribute the damn things. In my mind, and even in the minds of the deluded Omobba Brigade kids who were there, this was evidence of you taking a bribe from Manolo Candela and the Cuban DI, and I expect we’ll see much more where that came from. But if I’m wrong and there’s an explanation, then you just go right ahead and provide it.”

“You can’t accuse me…” she started screaming.

“I just did!” I screamed back.

Bedlam ensued, and the staffers were back, and Gramsci-Ramos gaveled the committee into a recess.

“Holy shit,” Burro said, laughing at me. “I thought I’d given her hell.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably too much.”

“Are you kidding? Right now you could go in in 2028 as easily as Diego did down in Cuba.”

“No thanks,” I said.

When the hearing finally gaveled back in, things had toned down significantly. I still got nasty questions from some of the Democrats, but most were performative, going-through-the-motions things. It was a lot of five-minute speeches with yes-or-no questions at the end.

And the Republicans were giving me tongue-baths. I was immortal as far as they were concerned. I knew some of them; that didn’t hurt.

But toward the end, and this is when I knew the disaster was complete, Gramsci-Ramos called on Naomi Yanko-Munsch, her roommate in that house in DC… and Yanko-Munsch declined to ask me anything.

That, I could tell, was not what Gramsci-Ramos intended to happen. She immediately skipped over the final Republican in line, a female freshman representative from suburban Indianapolis, to the objections of all of the Republicans in the room, and she called on Chad Dudenberger.

“S’up, Mr. Holman?” he asked me.

“Not a lot,” I said. “Just waiting for this to be over so I can get the hell out of here.”

He laughed.

“Look, ummm, I saw the video of Maceo doin’ his thing in – how do you pronounce it? HOLE-gun?”

“Ol-GEEN,” I said. “That tripped me up, too, at first.”

“Right. So that was the first, like, pro team he played for, and he went there, and that was a massive crowd, right?”

“It was absolutely one of the most magical things I ever saw. Same thing in Santiago, same thing in Havana. I don’t think there is a single American who is loved so thoroughly by our people as Diego Maceo is in Cuba.”

“Cooool,” said Dudenberger. “VERY cool story, bro.”

“Is that all you have, Mr. Dudenberger?” Gramsci-Ramos asked.

“Nah, actually, and this is… I don’t know who can answer it, but how do I caucus with the other side?”

I flew home to a hero’s welcome from the PGFI folks; PJ decided to throw a little party at the house, and the whole office, plus half the neighborhood, was there. My wife could barely walk; she was so pregnant, and she didn’t last far into the soiree.

Which was fine.

I’d gotten invites to fly to New York, back to D.C., to Los Angeles, and even to London to do interviews about the Cuba project. I turned everything down because I’d spent enough time away from PJ for a very long while and I insisted that, at least until the baby was born, I wasn’t going anywhere.

Not to mention we were worried about reprisals.

PJ and I had blocked out a home defense plan when we moved into the house, and that plan involved both of us. She’d been in the Secret Service before I’d met her, after all; she was a very good shot, and she knew her way around a tactical situation. I’d hunted all my life, and I was a regular at the gun range, so while I’d never killed anybody, I at least had the ability to defend myself with a firearm.

Our plan had to change given PJ’s condition, though. And Hal had texted me during the party, asking me about security.

I called him the next morning and told him that the big plate-glass windows in the back of the house were all bulletproof; the house was wired up with cameras that went to a security service, we had two Dogo Argentinos who were just about the best guard dogs anybody could have, plus Victor and Chris were splitting shifts as outdoor security working out of Sentinel’s Miami office.

“Do you have a panic room in the house?” he asked.

“What we have is a ballistic screen that rolls to cover the entrance to the walk-in closet in the master bedroom,” I said. “It makes that closet function as a panic room, though it’s not as hardened as a panic room.”

“OK,” he said.

“Our plan is, if God forbid something happens, that PJ takes Little Mike and barricades herself in there. I’ve got gun safes in the coat closet in the foyer, the master bedroom, and my office on the other side of the house, so I can get my hands on a gun pretty quick anywhere I am.”

“All right, that’s fine.”

“Why, Hal?”

“I’m just being careful. You know that we’ve repurposed that Chinese listening station at Bejucal into a Sentinel Security facility; we’re building an international threat assessment and tracking network that’ll run out of our Miami offices.”

“Yeah. I knew that. Congrats on the new gig running the place, Hal.”

“Thanks. But with the Avispas Negras all being out of a job, and the DI and DSE being disbanded, and the cartel thugs being displaced out of Cuba…”

“I know. Miami’s the place to try to watch ‘em from. I get it.”

“I’m just on edge. It would be natural for them to come after our people.”

“Well, if you think I need something else, let me know.”

“I’d say you’re OK. But Roman’s coming in tomorrow and we’re going to go through the protocols for all of the PGFI people in case…”

“Just let me know, all right?”

“I will. By the way,” he said, chuckling, “I read Johnson’s piece about this guy Dudenberger. What a jackass.”

Holman Media had broken the story about the Justice Department investigation into the unnamed donor who had supplied the resources for Dudenberger to place his mother, who had a moderate case of Alzheimer’s Disease, in a very high-end memory care center in Alexandria, Virginia. The reporting focused on Friends of Friends, a nonprofit organization the DNC Chairman sat on the board of. Dudenberger refused comment, though a staffer who had just tendered his resignation was quoted as saying, “They bought him, and he flipped because he knew he was screwed. Maybe he’ll sing to the feds and they’ll let him keep his job.”

Which would have created an interesting situation. If Dudenberger had resigned from Congress, it was virtually assured the Democrats would win his seat in a special election, and then they’d have 218 seats for real. So he probably would be in a position to keep his job.

But later that day, Sibel Al-Rahman resigned her seat in Congress. She’d been as useful as they could make her. And until the special election to replace her, that took the Democrats down to 216 seats.

The country had a case of whiplash. Michaelson gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation saying that it was unfortunate that Cuba’s politics seemed to be more stable than America’s. And I wondered, if I was going to be as paranoid as Hal was getting paid to be, if I ought to be less worried about Cubans than the lunatics among my countrymen.

PJ didn’t want to hear it. She made a big thing of paella that night, and we just hung out with the kid and the dogs.

“What I want,” she said, “is decompression. I am gonna pop any minute, and I want no stress until then and no stress after. When Pierce calls with some new save-the-world scheme, you are gonna tell him no.”

“Thankfully,” I said, “he’s got his hands so full doing in Cuba what he did in Guyana that I think we’ve bought ourselves a good six months to a year.”

She smiled and said she didn’t believe me, but she left it at that.

And the next day was more of the same, though we did spend some time trying to agree on where in the backyard we would finally get around to installing a home for Simon’s cross. It had been sitting in the utility room, which I had felt was a sin, for several months at that point, but I was sort of paralyzed by indecision as to what to do with it.

“You should have seen how he had it, PJ,” I said. “It was in this little pagoda, so he could close it off and protect it from the weather. But when he opened it, he could pray in front of it and behind it you’d see the Singapore Strait and then the Singapore skyline. Our place is nice, but I can’t compete with that.”

“Do you hear yourself?” she said. “Just decide on something and let’s put the cross up. If not, we’re donating it to the church.”

Then that night, after I did a Dan Bongino segment from the office, I’d let Thor and Sancho out – Robby had decided to crash in his doggie bed in the nursery with Little Mike – and we were on the couch. I was giving her another foot rub.

“I hope you realize that after the baby comes, these are gonna get a lot less frequent,” I said. “I’m saying you are spoiled rotten.”

“I’d argue,” she said, “but you’re probably right. By the way, on Monday we’re gonna see the OB-GYN and I’m gonna basically demand that she induce labor. This kid is a procrastinator.”

“You’re nine and a half months,” I said. “It’s… not freakish, but that is plenty.”

“Look, Holman, you married into some very fertile people. I’m one of four kids; my mom was one of five. You know that, right?”

“Oh yeah. I’m aware.”

“Except this?” She patted her belly. “This is knocking the stuffing right out of me. I don’t know if I can do this again.”

“Well, we said we’d do a boy and a girl,” I said. “So…”

“We said we’d do at least one of each. So if this is a she, then, y’know.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Should we have asked what sex the baby is?”

“Nah.”

“OK. I mean, I want to know, but…”

“Wait, what was that?” I asked.

“What? Fireworks?”

“You know better than that.”

PJ’s face changed, and for a moment she wasn’t pregnant anymore. She leapt off the couch and was hustling to the nursery to get Little Mike per our plan. I ran for the coat closet in the foyer at the front of the house.

“Thunk! Thunk!” came a sound behind me. I turned and saw the two spider webs in the ballistic glass.

Then I was opening the gun safe, grabbing and loading the Beretta 9mm pistol I was most comfortable with, and…

The loudest boom and crash I’ve ever heard threw me into the side wall of the closet, knocking the breath out of me and doing a number on my eardrums.

I was disoriented, and I staggered backward into the foyer. Then I felt a hard punch on my left shoulder. The pain woke me up, and I could see somebody coming through a big hole in the plate glass in the back of the house.

I raised the Beretta and fired, and I could see a spray of red spread out from his head.

He fell, and the guy behind him was disoriented by the blood hitting him in the face, and I had a clear shot at him. Center mass, got him. He was dead before he hit the ground.

But the third guy was shooting. It happened really fast. He was shooting, I was shooting, we were both in the open. I hit him at least twice, but I felt a hard punch in the gut. And then, as I was trying to get behind the credenza in the foyer, I took another on the hip and all of a sudden, my right leg stopped working.

I crashed into the credenza. The lamp was knocked over and fell on the floor, a bunch of PJ’s decorative stuff flew everywhere, and Father Soto’s rosary beads, that I kept in a ceramic bowl on that credenza, fell on the floor as the bowl shattered.

And I went down just a few feet from that rosary.

The third guy was limping toward me. I raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. That was frustrating. So I pulled it again and got the same result.

Dammit.

I wanted to check the slide and see if it was jammed, but I couldn’t move my left arm. It was just limp. It didn’t work anymore.

I tried to sit up and couldn’t do that. The guy kept coming so I pulled the trigger again and nothing happened.

And I had this incredible headache that made it hard to keep my eyes open.

The guy was standing over me. He was holding his side with one hand. And he was bleeding pretty profusely from his thigh.

And he reached in his pocket and took out a clip.

“I betchu wish you had one-a these, cabron,” he said in a thick Cuban accent.

He reloaded, and then he took off his ski mask, and I recognized him. This was Lido, the skinny thug who’d been with Cabrillo. How did he get all the way here, in my house?

I pulled the trigger again. It was all I could think to do.

“I fucking shot you,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “You’re gonna die.”

“I fuckin’ shot you, too, maricon. We both gonna die.”

He laughed, and he pointed his gun at me. I closed my eyes.

And then I heard three shots. But they came from behind me, not in front of me.

I opened my eyes, and there was Lido, lying on the ground in front of me, the left side of his head caved in.

“PJ!” I heard somebody yelling. “PJ! If you’re here, get out here right now!”

It was… Roman. I recognized his voice.

I tried to turn my head to look at him. To say something. I couldn’t.

Nothing was working.

Then he was turning me over on my back. Looking me over. Robby was licking my face, a panicked energy about him. It irritated me. I wanted him to stop and I tried to tell him so, but nothing came out.

Because nothing was working. And I was getting more and more pissed off about that. Why wasn’t anything working?

“OK, Mike,” he said. “It’s over, buddy. EMS is coming and we’re gonna get you all fixed up. You stay with me, you hear?”

I looked at him. I blinked once. Blinking once was yes, right?

Then I saw Father Soto’s beads. I reached for them. I could move my right arm, but it was so damned slow.

Then PJ was near me. She was crying. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. I thought, “I don’t ever want to see this look again.”

“How did this happen?” she was screaming at Roman. “How could…”

“I’ve been calling you for an hour!” said Roman. “You and Mike! Couldn’t get an answer!”

And I thought, oh, shit. I forgot to take my phone off silent after the Bongino hit.

He was telling her that they’d tracked cell phones. That they knew who the attackers were. That he was there because the system in Miami worked.

“But you’ve got to fight, Mike,” he said. “Fight, boy. Stay with us.”

I blinked at him, and then I reached for Father Soto’s beads again. Then PJ was in my face, filling up my vision.

“Mike,” she said, “don’t you DARE die on me. You hear me? DON’T YOU DARE DIE ON ME.”

Epilogue

Miami, Florida — July 29, 2027

 

I didn’t die on PJ.

I gave it one hell of a shot, but I didn’t die. God must have pulled the hook out of my mouth and thrown me back in the water, but let me tell you, I got a good damned look at purgatory.

I got that at St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm, which is where they brought me. I’d lost so much blood that they had to give me transfusion after transfusion just to keep me alive while they tried to stabilize me. I was in a coma for three days.

I had to have major surgery – well, multiple major surgeries – in three places.

That bullet which tore through my shoulder blew up my humeral head, and I got a standard shoulder arthroplasty out of it. That was basically an afterthought, though.

Compared to the wound to the abdomen. That bullet lodged in my small intestine, and they had to go in and section off three feet of the thing and stitch it back together. I fought off sepsis while I was in the ICU. They fed me through an IV tube for weeks while my bowels healed. I lost 54 pounds.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the bullet to my hip. It shattered my pelvic bone, and the shards caused massive internal bleeding. Transfusion after transfusion while they stabilized the pelvic area, and for a while, the doctor told me they thought they had a losing battle on their hands. The doctor later told me it was a similar wound to the one Steve Scalise suffered. And after I was out of the woods, Scalise came to see me. He was on the way to a confab at Trumbull’s place in Palm Beach and he dropped by.

He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to.

I was seventeen days in the ICU. Eleven weeks overall at St. Mary’s. And then an unknown period of time in rehab before I can say I’ve made a full recovery.

Who am I kidding? I’ll never recover from this. Every time I close my eyes, I see that sonofabitch standing over me.

I’m walking again, though. Little Mike started walking without help well before I did. But it’s gradually coming. The physical therapy works, though there’s so much damned pain. And I absolutely refuse to become an opioid addict, so I bear it.

I bear it with alcohol. I can tell that makes PJ nervous, but she tries not to say anything.

When I came to, I found out what had happened. PJ told me.

The team that came for us was using a cellphone jammer. It wouldn’t have mattered that my phone was on silent – it was – or that PJ had left hers in the nursery and forgotten about it. The calls wouldn’t have gotten through anyway.

There were five of them. I killed those first two who came through the hole in the glass, Roman killed Lido, and PJ got the fourth guy who made for the bedroom while I was trading lead with Lido. She’d pulled the ballistic shield mostly closed but left a gun slit, and when he came into her line of sight, entering the bedroom, she’d blasted him in the temple.

The fifth guy was the boss. He was Cuban like Lido, but he wasn’t like Lido. That guy was a major in the Avispas Negras, the Black Wasps – Cuban special forces. Those guys had been put out of business when the regime fell; the regular army didn’t want anything to do with them and put them out on the street. And the boss had set up a hide with a clear shot to the front door of my house, and when the rest of the team came through the back, with enough noise to spook Victor, who was parked in the front driveway, he’d popped Victor in the lung as he got out of the Tahoe.

Poor guy. Victor was three doors down from me at St. Mary’s. He made them wheel him in to see me as soon as both of us could take visitors.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Holman,” he said. “I should’ve—”

“Stop right there,” I said. “You took a bullet for me. You don’t apologize for that. Not to me, not ever.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to.

Roman told me the boss had bought it that night as well. He didn’t get shot; “he got run the fuck over.”

“What seems like happened,” Roman said, “was that he was waiting on that front door. Anybody came through it, he’d take ‘em down. But when he heard all the gunfire in the house from you and your boy Lido, I think he realized his fire team was in trouble, so he left his hide to join the fight. Guy did everything right, but his timing was poor, because I clocked him as I came up the drive and he wasn’t any kinda match for a Dodge Charger.”

I asked if there was any evidence of a chain of command at work.

“Well, you won’t like the answer I have for you,” said Roman. “We don’t know who the boss’s boss is. We don’t know what kind of network still exists. But what we do know? Not great.”

He told me the other three assassins, the two I killed and the one PJ dispatched, were Americans. Antifa. And he explained that their means of transportation to my dock was a Cuban-made submersible drug boat.

When Pierce’s facility at Bejucal went online in December, they realized that they could track those submersibles by the GPS transponders they used. Sentinel Security managed to break the encryption on those transponders. As a result, the Navy had taken three of them out on the high seas just by using old-fashioned depth charges.

And one of those boats was sitting in a swamp in Islamorada, having dropped off its 10-ton load of coke, but its crew didn’t want to chance heading back where they came from. Lido and the three Antifa lunatics, Roman theorized, had commandeered the thing, turned off its transponder, and sailed it around the South Florida coast up to Jupiter.

Pierce’s surveillance system picked up Lido’s phone – he was still using a TODO phone, which tells you I was nearly killed by an abject moron – when it popped on just off West Palm Beach. I’m assuming they used that phone for GPS; if not, they’d rehearsed sailing a boat to my back dock. Which is a frightening thought.

I guess Boss Estrada made his way to the front of my house by car. But his car was never found, which is no bueno.

So I don’t get to feel like it’s over.

And PJ won’t set foot in our house. We cleaned it up, cleaned it out, put most of our stuff in storage, and the rest came with us to this condo in the sky in Edgewater where we’re living now. It’s nice, but it’s a prison. We can’t go anywhere, not even to walk the dogs, without a team of bodyguards.

That idyllic home she and I built is shattered. It’s gone. The Jupiter house is for sale, and we’re having “discussions” about what we’ll do next. Probably a house on a mountain in North Georgia, or maybe something defensible in the exurbs outside of Nashville. Pierce absolutely demanded that we let him buy us the house.

“Money is no object,” he said. It never is with him. And while I want to say no, the best I can come up with is “not yet.”

Because I don’t know what I want to do. I’m still so pissed off about losing Jupiter. I don’t even want to think about it. Besides, right now all I need is a comfy couch, a comfy bed, a well-stocked bar, and a treadmill to torture myself on so that it’s not immediately apparent that I’m a cripple.

But the next house won’t be on the water. Neither of us is comfortable with that. Thirty stories up in this skyscraper we’re living in now, and we’re still nervous about somebody hitting us from the water with an RPG like the one that destroyed our home in Jupiter.

And my heart is broken over that.

Or maybe that’s not quite accurate. I’m not heartbroken. I’m furious. I have a barely-controlled rage about me. And I know what Simon meant when he said I was going to need to lean into my faith. It’ll take a lot of prayer for me to let this – what happened, and what’s still potentially out there – go.

As dire as it sounds, though, we’re going to survive this. When I came out of my coma, it was to meet my daughter Mary Pauline Holman. She might have been slow into the world, but one look in those eyes of hers is all the proof I need that she’s going to be the quickest one of us.

PJ says she’s happy to try again. It might not be a bad idea. I want to surround myself with as many allies as I can.

Cuba under Diego is the hottest thing going. They’re talking about the U.S. Coast Guard opening a base at Cienfuegos, Toyota signed a deal to make pickup trucks in Holguín, Eli Lilly is setting up a big production facility east of Havana that’ll employ six thousand people. In the fall, they’re going to have local elections across the country, but the politicians aren’t going to have a lot to do.

I wish that was true in this country.

But even there, some good things did happen.

Dolores Gramsci-Ramos probably had an even worse January than I did. The week after I got shot, after Chad Dudenberger switched parties and John Michaelson regained the speaker’s gavel, she got stripped of all her committee assignments. The word was that was the deal Michaelson cut with Hakim to keep her from being expelled. Naomi Yanko-Munsch moved out of their little pleasure pad in D.C., and then Gramsci-Ramos took a “leave of absence” from Congress about a week before the news broke that the DOJ was investigating her for a FARA violation. Menendez, her former chief of staff, agreed to plead guilty; the rumor was that he was rolling over big-time, and not just against his boss.

Trumbull called me and said that when I could make it to the White House, he was going to give Pierce and me and Diego the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I’d tell you that I told him something noble like “give it to the Cuban people,” but I didn’t.

I want that damned thing. I think I earned the shit out of it. And when I told him so, he laughed.

And then he agreed.

“I wish I could give you a fuckin’ Purple Heart, Mike,” he said. “That’s what you earned. And believe me, I know.”

And we did donate Simon’s cross to the church.

But not our church.

It now sits above the altar at the Iglesia Parroquial Mayor del Espíritu Santo in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, which is the church where Father Soto tended to his flock before those animals got to him. I thought it would be one way to honor Simon – and the priest.

I kept Father Soto’s beads, though. I’m never going to have them too far away to reach again.

 

Before The Necessary Men, Mike Holman had already learned that trouble has a way of finding him – and that doing the right thing usually makes it worse. The previous Mike Holman novels deliver a hard-charging mix of intrigue, danger, and humor. Catch up on Mike Holman’s earlier adventures — and discover the road that led him straight into the Cuban crossfire.