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This Substack is a combo of a story bible and first draft for a piece of fiction I’m working on called The Masters—about Jesus Santiago, a Taino immortal, looking to collect his pound of flesh from a man he bumped into back in 1518. Problem is, it’s now 1950. And the man he’s looking for—John Spillers—runs J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance operation in Puerto Rico. In his world, he’s the FBI equivalent of a hockey enforcer and sommelier—a walking encyclopedia of owed favors and vendettas existing at multiple levels of island politics—a fixer who knows exactly how to kneecap people without leaving fingerprints. In addition to running local affairs from the shadows, Spillers runs an elite unit of soldiers he’s somehow endowed with super-human capabilities—JTF Alpha. Their sole purpose is to locate and collect individuals similar to him. People like Santiago.
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What’s it about?
Slavery, evolutionary biology, revenge, historical memory, and grief—a violent romp through history, folklore, and science—full of true, but-stranger-than-fiction nuggets. There are blood harvesting renditions, government conspiracies, werewolf battles with mercenaries, and the mad scramble to understand, reproduce, and militarize an incredible human capability encoded right in our DNA.
But really, what’s it about?
There are two types of immortals that walk among us. In 1950, tissue samples managed by the Los Alamos research group, are stolen from a lab in San Juan Puerto Rico, arousing the interest of FBI station chief John Spillers—the lone survivor of the ill-fated crew of the Santa Maria in 1492. The theft was orchestrated by Jesus Santiago, a Taino man who’s gone to great lengths to send Mr. Spillers a coded message—a small item from 1518, stashed inside an old wooden crate, right next to the stolen tissue samples. Spillers gets the crate, gets the message, and then it’s on. Complicating things is Captain Sepulveda, whose men were killed in a classified biological weapons exposure trial, related to the Los Alamos research group. He runs the secret detention facility that Santiago is being kept at, and is himself, dying of cancer. He’s got no idea about the beef between Santiago and Spillers. He just wants to know what happened to his men, and why.
Here’s what you get
