Prospero and Guano Island
A super spy, a secret island, and bird poop
After several weeks of college basketball coverage, I thought I’d change it up. I mentioned at the start of this Substack adventure that I’d throw in a few short stories from my upcoming collection, Captured Ghosts. Here’s one about a super spy and bird poop. I hope you like it.
Alex St. John was a spectre.
Recruited out of the Navy SEALS by Special Tactics and Reconnaissance, he became a “Spectre.” He loved the abbreviation. Technically, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance do not exist. He was a spook, an apparition, a ghost. He was a non-person. No one called him Alex. His call-sign was Prospero given to him by a commanding officer who loved The Tempest.
The United States government had plenty of special agents. Prospero was an extra special agent.
He joined the Navy at 17 with a clear goal to become a SEAL. He had spent far too many years being bullied for his skinny legs and braces. After serving several tours in Afghanistan, earning two political science degrees and one in chemical engineering, he was sent to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Special Tactics and Reconnaissance had a secret training facility. Two years at the facility had changed him physically and mentally even more than his SEAL training. His mind was as sharp as a diamond blade, his body lethal with or without a weapon. He was sophisticated and charming. Plus, he was straight out of central casting for male lead roles.
His age was 33, and he was in the most prime condition of his life. He was trained to be a killing machine, but far more than just that. He mastered every martial art, was an expert marksman in practically every form of gun, rifle, or artillery. He could speak thirteen languages fluently, and he beat Magnus Carlsen in chess when he secretly took over for the Bella Grey AI during an exhibition. His knife-throwing skills were slightly better than his ax-throwing. He free climbed El Capitan and replicated Alan Eustace’s skydive from the edge of space. He could hold his breath for twenty minutes which helped immensely when he was freediving in Kona on the big island looking for lost Japanese treasure. He was a world-class athlete, driver, and lover. He could teach philosophy to co-eds and code a catastrophic bug in your promising new start-up application.
Prospero was an Olympic-level swimmer at 200 meters. He could slice through hundreds of meters of water as easily as a hot knife through butter in full SCUBA gear. This time though, he was using the mini-sub. It wouldn’t do to have his wetsuit wrinkle his Tom Ford suit or his Turnbull & Asser shirt and tie.
He was supremely confident in his abilities and was hyper-focused on the mission at hand. Nervousness was a feeling abandoned decades ago. After all, the fate of the world was on his shoulders.
His destination was the private island of billionaire Zander Grossman. An invitation-only party was happening on the island in his extravagantly furnished house. The party was ostensibly for his non-profit environmental organization, PureSky. He had invited hundreds of global warming experts and environmentalists of all stripes to his home to talk a little business and gamble at the poker tables he had set up in his ballroom. It may sound non-threatening and maybe even humanitarian. However, the celebration was anything but altruistic. Grossman wasn’t someone who wanted to stop global warming. He was all about speeding it up.
The mini-sub silently reached the beach, and Prospero stepped onto the sand. He wore the Crockett & Jones Highbury shoes, which weren’t precisely beachwear. He checked his watch, a Seamaster Diver 300M Co-Axial enhanced with half a dozen ways to kill someone, and saw his timing was impeccable.
He pulled his Glock 19 from inside the waistband holster and inspected it. It was reliable, durable, and hidden. He placed it back into its holster and retrieved the forged invitation to the party he was crashing.
He made his way through the underbrush and trees. His mission was to scale a 60-foot cliff face, dispose of any guards, and make his way inside the Grossman estate by blending into the crowd. From there, he was to contact Grossman and make a wager at the poker table that would pique his interest. He knew Grossman would not back down when challenged. Prospero was a master card player in various games, including poker, blackjack, and baccarat. During his training in Alaska, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance flew up a string of World Series of Poker winners for him to play against. Of course, he beat them all.
The plan was not only to beat Grossman but humiliate him in the process in front of his guests. If he also impressed Grossman’s number two, the statuesque blonde model, skier, and polo player, Gisele Satine, all the better. Being the gracious host, Grossman would undoubtedly invite Prospero to stay as his guest offering a room and asking for the chance to win back his earnings. He could not refuse such a fantastic offer. Naturally, Grossman would send a few armed guards to his stateroom in the middle of the night to rough him up and take him to Grossman’s “playroom,” where Prospero would endure hours of torture. Escape would be easy either through Satine or using the laser in his Seamaster. He would confront Grossman, learn of the nuclear weapons drilled into the arctic, and dispatch the billionaire and blow up the control room, cutting off access to polar ice cap melting weapons. The mini-sub could hold two people if they lay on top of each other.
Prospero put the thought of him and Satine in the minisub with nothing but a bikini and his La Perla Grigioperla Lodato blue swim trunks between them out of his mind. He turned his focus on the next objective—scaling the cliff face. He found an excellent spot to start his ascent at the base of a tidal pool. With plenty of handholds, even in the pitch darkness, Prospero climbed up and barely caused a sound as he hopped over a shin-high guardrail made of large rocks.
Grossman trained Rottweilers, so Prospero was on the lookout for guard dogs. He kept low, looking for spotlights and guard towers. He saw nothing. The house was 300 meters away behind a large row of 15-foot-high pines, and he could faintly hear the party in the distance.
He stood up and straightened his tie. Without a sound, a giant white blob landed on his left shoulder. He immediately felt it and instinctively touched it with his right hand. It had a striking color scheme of white and black.
A bird had pooped on Prospero, ruining his expertly tailored suit jacket. He looked up, expecting to see the perpetrator of this indignant act, but was met with more bird poop, this time landing on his face, penetrating his eyes, and completely disorienting him. It threw him off balance just enough for him to stumble on the loose rocks and pitch forward over the tiny wall at the apex of the cliff.
He cracked his head on the rocky edge of the tidal pool and gently slid down into its deepest point. He would never be recovered.
Zander Grossman was killed by Gisele Satine, a secret undercover agent of MI6, before the nuclear warheads could be detonated.
Captured Ghosts is coming soon.
Be seeing you.
Run it Back
Brad Underwood’s pitch to his Illinois roster after the Final Four run was three words. Run it back.
This week, most of them said yes.
Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic, plus Jake Davis, are coming back. Of course, David Mirkovic made it official, too. Lastly, Andrej Stojakovic is returning to the Illini for his senior season. That’s five returning players who all started at one point during the course of last year on a team that got to the Final Four. Aside from out-of-eligibility student-athletes like Ben Humrichous and Kylan Boswell, the only real departure is Keaton Wagler, who’s a projected top-ten pick, and even he said that decision was “a very tough” one. You don’t hold on to a top-ten pick. Nobody does.
But look at what Illinois is holding.
Those five players alone accounted for 56.2% of the Illini’s minutes last season, 56.6% of the Illini’s points last season and 58.7% of the Illini’s rebounding last season. This is a team that knows where the seats are in its own locker room.
Isaac Trotter said on Twitter, “Illinois becomes just the third team in the portal era to make a Final Four and bring back at least five rotation players.”
They added one transfer as of this writing: Providence transfer guard Stefan Vaaks, an elite shooter and playmaker. He’s the Wagler replacement. The incoming freshmen are all ready to contribute, with one being a top 35 player in the country (Quentin Coleman) and another (Zavier Zens) being Wisconsin’s 2026 Mr. Basketball. Speaking of Wisky, I’d like Wisconsin guard John Blackwell to join from the transfer portal to make this squad the preseason favorite to win it all.
I’m not booking any tickets for the Final Four in Detroit quite yet, but this upcoming year could be amazing.
Blue in Green on Loop
Miles Davis recorded “Blue in Green” in 1959 for Kind of Blue. The original runs five and a half minutes. Someone who goes by READ TO THIS on YouTube stretched it to two hours, and that version has become the sound of most of my writing this year.
Bill Evans’ piano opens with a chord that feels like someone taking a slow breath before they start a hard conversation. Then Miles comes in, muted, barely pushing any air. Nothing about it is background. It isn’t ambient sound. It’s music just patient enough to let you think.
What I like about the two-hour version is that it removes the moment where a song ends. You sit down, you press play, and, at least for me, the focus comes. An hour later, you look up, and you’ve written something.
If you try it, do me a favor. Don’t have it on while you answer emails. Save it for the kind of work that actually requires you to be alone with a sentence.
The Losing Streak
I try not to spend much time with this newsletter on the president. Most of you didn’t sign up to hear me work through the news cycle, and there are plenty of people doing that better and louder. But Fred Kaplan wrote a piece in Slate this week that I can’t quite stop thinking about, and it’s worth five minutes of your time.
The short version. Trump had the worst weekend of his second term. Viktor Orbán, his favorite European ally, lost his reelection bid in a landslide after sixteen years in power. The Iran peace talks in Islamabad collapsed after one day because Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner flew in, delivered a list of demands, and flew home when Iran said no. Lastly, Keir Starmer, the British prime minister who has tried harder than anyone to stay on the president’s good side, publicly said he was fed up.
Gee, aren’t we all?
The Blog
Quick housekeeping.
If you like Saturday Night Five, there’s a microblog version of this brain happening over at seanmcdevitt.net. The posts there are almost always short little bits of thought or ideas. It’s mostly about whatever caught my eye that week and wouldn’t let go. One day it's a quote I like, another it’s an interesting video.
Bookmark it. Share one you like. All good.
