The Theta Prophecy (17 page)

Year: 1963

McCone looked down at the report in horror. How was his agency able to overthrow entire governments and yet fail to shoot one man even when everything had been laid out for them on a platter? Six men with varying assignments—shooters, a driver, lookouts—had been given JFK’s motorcade route ahead of time. They had been given the resources they needed. They had time to scope out the area prior to the president’s visit to make sure they could gain access to the buildings they needed. And yet, when the time had come, not a single bullet had been fired.

When he slammed his fist down on his desk, his secretary looked up from her typewriter, through the narrow slits of McCone’s office window. He gave her a mock smile and looked back down at the report.

“Three shooters and not a single shot?” he said to himself. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

When the telephone rang, he closed his eyes and considered not answering it. If he spoke to his secretary about such things, she would tell him it was the one thing he had in common with his predecessor. He didn’t dare say such things to her, however, for the simple fact that she had been there before him. And anyone, in Washington at least, who lasted from one regime to another was being looked out for from higher up. He understood the game well enough now to know that the same men who had given his name to the president as a good candidate for the director’s role had also installed a secretary who would watch what their man was doing and report back on anything out of the ordinary.

The phone rang again and again. He knew who it was and why he would be calling. Three more times it rang while McCone considered opening his office door and telling his secretary he was gone for the day. The worst part about everything, though, was that the men who got him here had people everywhere. Even if his secretary didn’t care if he ignored the call, he was sure someone else was watching his every action. Just as JFK had said, in every sector of society, in every field and type of career, there was someone working toward a secret goal. They were everywhere. No, if he walked out right now and left without answering the call, they would know about it. The way they seemed to know everything.

On the next ring, he reached down and picked up the receiver.

“What happened?” the man said, not bothering with introductions.

McCone cringed. He hated the way Martin asked these open-ended questions, as if he were fully aware that anything said over a phone was likely being recorded and wanting McCone to know the same thing.

“The operation wasn’t successful.”

“I know that,” the Fed chairman said. “Don’t you think I know that? I want to know
why
it wasn’t successful.”

McCone looked down at the report that his men had put together following the botched assassination attempt. He had to hand it to the man who had written the report: the bastard couldn’t organize a successful assassination if his life depended on it but he knew how to capture every detail as it unfolded.

He pulled the mouthpiece directly over his lips and said, “The men reported that someone else must have known about the operation ahead of time.”

“Nonsense.”

“They are sure someone else knew about their plans.”

“Bullshit,” Martin screamed into the phone, forcing McCone to pull the earpiece away from his ear.

But he went on: “They said when they went to their designated sites two days before, everything was set. Same thing when they went back the next day. But then, the day of the actual operation, the same doors that had been unlocked before had locks on them. And there were security guards when there hadn’t been before.”

“Listen, you—”

“They also said all of the trees and shrubs where Member 3 was supposed to be positioned had all been cut down in the hours before the operation was supposed to take place.”

“It’s obvious what happened. Your men aren’t as good as they think they are. They were too obvious. Someone noticed them.”

“The team was good. They were the same men who performed flawlessly on Operation Flamenco—”

“If your team was good, we wouldn’t be having this call.”

“They’re adamant that someone with prior knowledge of the operation must have been there.” The director couldn’t help but smile before he added, “Maybe you have a leak.”

“Listen to me, damn it,” Martin said. “Be quiet and listen to me.”

McCone ground his teeth. Had Dulles experienced a similar conversation before getting caught in the middle of something he couldn’t get himself—or his career at least—out of? Or had Dulles never let himself get into this situation in the first place by instead turning in his papers and going home?

The few times McCone distanced himself from what he was doing, he was fully conscious that the rest of the country, even his family, would be horrified by the operation he was secretly carrying out. But, he kept telling himself, it was for the greater good of the country. Martin said it was, and the man had proof. McCone had to go along with it, no matter how bad a taste it left in his mouth, no matter how much he hated having to put up with Martin’s outbursts.

The Fed chairman said, “There is no leak here. No one knew about the operation who shouldn’t have known about it. If there was a mistake, it was something your men did.”

“But—”

“But nothing. You will need to organize the same operation again in two weeks.”

“That doesn’t give me much time to—”

“Two weeks.”

“Very well, I’ll—” but the other man had already hung up and McCone was left holding a phone with no one on the other end.

He put the receiver down and looked through his notes. Member 1 had been adamant in the report that someone must have known exactly where they were going to be. Member 2 and 3 had said the same thing. McCone shook his head in disbelief. Everyone thought they were an expert and everyone thought they knew more than the next guy. He scanned through a different paper to find Member 1’s real name.

Harold Silver.

Silver had no idea what he was in for. It had to be that way. He was the only man in the group who wouldn’t get away with the killing. Someone had to be held accountable, after all. Someone always had to play the part of the patsy. Harold would never know how lucky he was that the operation had been a failure. If it had been a success, an anonymous tip would have led the police right to him, where the entire plot would have been pinned on him. And before he could explain that he was nothing more than a fall guy, he would have been shot dead by someone else with ties to the secret agenda. Now, Silver would live out the rest of his years never knowing he was supposed to die a few hours after the president was assassinated in Chicago.

That was the past, though. McCone had to forget about what happened in Chicago and start work on getting another team to where JFK would be in two weeks. He had to check the president’s schedule to see where that would be.

Tampa.

Through his office window, he saw everyone was gone for the day except for his secretary. Why was she always smiling at him through his office window? Was it a matter of being polite to the boss, or was she fully aware of the things he was being asked to do? He had told her countless times that she didn’t have to remain there after five o’clock, and yet she always did, always stayed until he also left. Was she driving for a pay raise, or was it something else?

As if sensing she was being looked at, his secretary once again looked up from her typewriter and smiled at him through his window. This time, he smiled back.

Without being able to answer what her motivation was, he knew his next steps couldn’t wait until the following day. He put a call in to have a team of men sent to Tampa that very night. It would be another six-man operation. And just like the Chicago group had done, they would be responsible for finding a position suitable for a triangular attack.

Before he forgot, he checked to make sure whoever was designated as Member 1 was expendable since whoever it was would be dead soon after.

Everything would work out. It had to, as Martin said, for the future of the country.

Year: 1963

Everything had worked perfectly in Chicago. JFK was alive. The Theta Timeline had shifted. The Tyranny would never form. Life was good.

But then Winston realized that the men who were supposed to have ambushed the president were still out there. The people who had ordered those killers to carry out the shooting were also still out there. If they were set on killing JFK, they wouldn’t give up just because they hadn’t succeeded in Chicago.

That night, watching an entire case of beer slowly become an entire case of empty bottles, he knew there was only one thing he could do. It wasn’t an option to stay in Chicago and pretend he had given it his best shot. He had given up everything he knew. His parents. His brother. They all depended on him to change history and give them a world free from being terrorized by the Tyranny’s men, a world that wasn’t constantly afraid of what the Tyranny would do next. Stopping now, knowing the president was still at risk, wasn’t possible.

The only thing he could do was sell his house in the Windy City just as he had sold Jesse’s house in California and follow the president wherever he went. He would travel the country, a nomad with a purpose.

It wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded, though. First off, as Jesse Cantrou, he led a comfortable life, but that didn’t mean he could afford to travel the country forever. His money would quickly run out. Second, only in Chicago—and only in that specific section of Chicago—did people know and willingly listen to Jesse Cantrou. Everywhere else he went, he would be just another guy—no favors to call in and no connections to get things done. Third, he had no idea how long he could follow the president around the country before the Secret Service took notice of him and began to look into why some random guy who had almost drowned in a boating accident near San Francisco was now apparently stalking JFK. And last but not least, removing shrubs and locking doors might have worked in Chicago, but it wouldn’t work forever. The assassins would figure out that someone was working against them and come up with a different plan.

When the last beer was gone, he went to his bathroom and threw up in the toilet the rest of the night. Each time he gagged up more vomit, gold liquid dripped from his nose. And each time, he knew that one of those four risks would end up being his downfall. But there was nothing else he could do except keep trying to change the Theta Timeline further and further from the reality he knew, to one in which JFK was still alive and the Tyranny wasn’t.

He quit his job the very next day.

“Why?” the warehouse owner said, sorry to see his best man leave.

“Need to take care of my father. He doesn’t have much longer to live.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the warehouse owner said. “You’ll be missed, Jesse.”

Winston put his house up for sale. There weren’t many possessions to box up and get out of the house.

“You’ll need to take care of all the paperwork,” he told his realtor. “I’m leaving town tonight. But I’ll give you a forwarding number when I get one so you can reach me.”

Without any other farewell, he flew to Tampa. That was where the newspapers said JFK would be going next.

Kennedy arrived there on November 18, 1963. Members of the press followed the president to the Tampa beaches, where they took pictures of the First Family. Winston was there too, keeping a distance from the throngs of reporters so he could watch the entire scene. He wasn’t worried about the assassination taking place on the beach. It was too open for a sniper to take up a position out of view. What he was worried about was the drive the president would take the following day through the city.

This time, unlike in Chicago, Winston didn’t know where the assassins would be set up. The parade route ran for miles. There was no way he could hire an entire city’s worth of homeless people to gather intel for him. He would spend his entire savings on locksmiths if he tried the same tactics that had worked so well the previous time.

The one advantage he had was that the parade route was published in the prior day’s papers. It should have been a secret, a way to prevent the exact thing that Winston knew was going to happen, but there were whispers that the president had upset some very powerful people who didn’t care if the route was a secret or not.

He hired a taxi driver to take him along the entire route, looking for vacant buildings, warehouses, and other places where shooters could remain hidden while also having a good vantage point. That was how he found a strip of warehouses and factories similar to the ones that Harold Silver and his accomplices had wanted to use in Chicago.

But with limited time and resources, his options for how to thwart the killers were limited. He went to a hardware store and bought a bag of locks. He went to a gun store and bought their entire supply of a new product that was gaining popularity amongst young women: pepper spray.

All of the warehouses he went to were empty for the day. Not even a security guard roaming the halls. The only reason there had been some in Chicago was because he convinced the other managers to bring them on. To his dismay, most of the buildings that looked like feasible hideouts were even unlocked.

Four hours before the president’s motorcade was due to drive through, he began. With one duffel bag full of pepper spray and another full of hundreds of locks, he went about stringing up canisters of noxious gas in every room that faced the street. The next time anyone opened each door, the canister’s pin would be pulled and the pepper spray would be released. Then, for good measure, he put a heavy padlock on each of the doors. Even if the assassins brought a pair of bolt cutters, which they likely wouldn’t have on them after having visited the buildings the previous day and finding them unlocked, they wouldn’t be able to stop crying long enough to get a good shot off.

For good measure, he called the Tampa Police department twenty minutes before the motorcade was due to pass through and told them he saw a pair of men with guns on the top floors of two warehouses. When they asked for his name, he hung up. The Tampa Police department was likely receiving just as many death threats concerning the president as the Chicago police had, but he hoped that giving them specific buildings would be enough for them to send a pair of squad cars out to investigate. From the corner of the block, his hope was confirmed.

Thirty minutes before the motorcade was due to pass by, each pair of police officers looked through the warehouse, accidently setting off pepper spray in certain rooms, and then returned to the cars with a pair of men in handcuffs. The supposed killers.

A couple minutes later, the president’s motorcade passed by. No shots were fired. But also, later that night, there were no reports on the news of suspected assassins in police custody. He called the police station from a payphone, claiming to be a reporter from the
Herald
.

“We had two guys,” a cop told him after making sure his name wouldn’t be written in the article. “But someone came by an hour later and got them.”

“Got them?” Winston said, his mouth hanging open.

“Yeah, some bigwig. Came in, spoke to the precinct captain, took the guys out along with any paperwork that said they had ever been there.”

Winston hung up the phone.