And to make matters worse, the man who the president relied on almost exclusively, the Attorney General, was his own brother, which made JFK even less susceptible to a room full of men telling him this invasion was necessary for national security or that law should be passed for the betterment of the economy.
In a way, it only made things easier for the people like Martin. Instead of assisting with another coup or assassinating another country’s president, Martin and Dulles worked without the president’s knowledge to make sure that events played out, like the Bay of Pigs, which made the entire administration look like an incompetent band of fools.
It was so bad in fact that the newspapers were reporting that the mess in Cuba was the reason Dulles had been asked to step down. Of course, it hadn’t been that at all. Kennedy had politely asked his former Director of Central Intelligence to retire because he not only refused to tell the president all the names and locations of the people who were suppressing any information about time travel, he was refusing to scale back the program. It was all insane.
McCone, the new Director of Central Intelligence, didn’t even know he was going to be a part of Martin’s squad yet. But he would.
“Do you know why Dulles is no longer the director?” he said.
“Of course. The Bay of Pigs fiasco.”
For weeks, the papers had been speculating if Kennedy, who really was furious about what had happened in Cuba, had demanded that Dulles step down or if the director had done so voluntarily. Martin was one of the few who knew the real reason Dulles had left: he no longer had the stomach for what needed to be done. Dulles had wanted to serve Martin and their cause, but he also wanted to serve the president and his country. When the two objectives didn’t align and he was stuck in the middle, he saw no alternative but to get out.
Good riddance, as far as Martin was concerned. He needed people he could trust to do whatever was needed, no matter how repugnant the rest of the country might think their actions. Dulles simply wasn’t that man. But as long as he kept silent the rest of his life, didn’t start blabbing about what everyone would take to be a nonsensical conspiracy theory, he would be fine.
“You are quickly going to realize that there are two sets of tasks in your new job,” he told McCone.
“Of course,” the new director said, nodding. “The stuff the public can know about and the stuff we must keep secret.”
“Sort of,” Martin said. This was the part he liked most, seeing the look on each man’s face when they realized why they had been on the short list of candidates to be selected by the president. “More accurately, the stuff people can know about and the stuff they cannot.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“It is not.”
Cold air puffed from McCone’s mouth when he scoffed in annoyance. “Well, I don’t see how not.”
“The president is a person, albeit a very popular one, but a person nonetheless. Like I said, there is stuff people can know about and the stuff they cannot.”
The pair of men walked through a bend in the trail, arcing around a trio of cherry trees with plaques at their bases to commemorate the individual each tree was dedicated to.
“I think I understand what you’re saying,” McCone said.
“It’s for the best. The things we have to do, sometimes, are not things normal men can accept. It takes people of will and determination to do what other men cannot. Men such as yourself.”
“Thank you.”
The Fed Chairman smiled. McCone’s personality assessment had been flawless. A little flattery went a long way with some people.
“You will quickly discover for yourself that our president is a man of boundless ideals and romantic sentiments. This would make him a great poet. But as a president, he is a liability.”
“How do you mean?”
“He has these notions about how the world should be. They make for nice discussion in college classrooms, I’m sure, but they are not practical in the real world. Men like you and I are the ones who need to ensure the path for not only this country, but for the world.”
“Work against our president?”
“Not against him. In spite of him is more like it. He is already making a nuisance of himself, constantly badgering me for some information I possess. Each time I refuse he acts like a petulant child and threatens to reduce the Federal Reserve’s power.” Martin leaned his head back and laughed. “I keep telling him he’s more than welcome to have Congress call me to Washington to testify about it.”
“But what if he does?”
“He will quickly find out how limited his powers are. Let me ask you a question: why do you think our president has such a reputation for being a ladies’ man?”
“The rumors of Marilyn Monroe and—”
“No. I can assure you that our president is no more or less faithful to his wife than any other president before him, and probably all those after him as well. But everyone whispers about Kennedy sneaking off for rendezvous with various beauties. Why do you think that is?”
“Because of how famous his girlfriends are?”
“No. Not a bad guess. But no. It’s because Hoover has all of his men at the FBI giving little comments here and there about how much Kennedy needs to lie on his back. As far as I can tell, it’s actually supposed to be an insult to his nearly crippled back and how much pain he suffers through every day, needing to spend hours lying flat on his back in the Oval Office rather than sitting in a chair. But the press hears these things and they take it and run, assuming that it must mean he’s always on his back because of a famous beauty.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Because it’s what Hoover does. It’s his idea of payback or mind games or something else. Who knows? But it’s trivial. It’s not the sort of action men like you and I take part in. While Hoover is playing his rumor mill games at the president’s expense, you and I will be shaping the country.”
“And if the president stands in our way?”
“He will discover that he is not as invincible as he thinks he is, which—you would think—would be obvious considering how much pain medication he requires for his back. But I will give him one thing: he is stubborn. That much is for sure.” When Martin looked over and saw McCone frowning at these last comments, he added, “Just think of it as part of the job duties. There are operations that you will carry out in other countries. Some are our allies, some are not.”
“Yes.”
“And,” the Fed Chairman continued, looking around at how beautifully desolate the park was this time of year, “there are some operations you will carry out by request of the president and some that are not.”
“Agreed.”
“Democratically elected leaders will be killed.”
“Of course.”
“Countries will be thrown into turmoil.”
“I’m sure they will.”
What Martin liked most wasn’t that the new director replied without hesitation, it was that he refrained from asking any of the inconvenient questions that had kept his predecessor awake at night. Once someone started asking those questions, they weren’t cut out for the job.
“And sometimes,” Martin said. “If worst comes to worst, these operations will need to be carried out in our own country.”
“Whatever is for the greater good.”
The Fed Chairman thought about saying, “That is why you were on the short list of candidates,” but he kept silent. McCone, during his time with the Atomic Energy Commission, had quickly earned a reputation as someone who did whatever was asked of him.
Instead, Martin said, “I think you’ll do very well in your new position.”
“Thank you.”
Approaching the park’s exit, Martin patted the white-haired man on the shoulder and told him they would stay in touch. Maybe, when the time was right, he would tell McCone about what had been found at Oak Island and about how important it was to preserve a certain path fo
r the country. For now, he knew McCone would do whatever was asked of him without even needing to know about future dangers.
As Martin’s black town car drove away from the park, McCone getting into his own chauffeured car, the Fed Chairman thought about how few people ever realized how much they didn’t know. In Washington, more than anywhere else, people liked to think they knew everything. But it was actually where people knew the least of all. Congress had no idea that the results of their confirmation hearings were trivial; if they didn’t approve a certain candidate, the president would be handed another name that would work just as well. McCone would never know he had only been on the list of candidates because of what his bio said about him. JFK would never know the candidates that had been given to him for the new director’s position had all been selected by Martin’s associates. He would also never realize the Bay of Pigs was just a diversion to keep him scrambling, keep him from thinking about the Oak Island book.
But most importantly, JFK would never realize that just because he was elected by the people, that didn’t make him the true leader of the country.
21 – What Actually Happened In Chicago?
Year: 1963
In the reality of Winston’s Theta Timeline, everyone knew by the time they were in middle school exactly how JFK had been assassinated. The grainy black and white footage of it was shown in movies, on news programs, and to classrooms full of horrified children. The president shot as his motorcade passed through the city. His head jerking as the bullet struck. A lone shooter.
On November 3, the day after arriving in Chicago, the president’s motorcade drove through the city, throngs of supporters on either side of the road, cheering as his car passed. The route took him right by Wrigley Field. But then, immediately after his car turned off of Waveland Avenue and onto North Broadway, an area of warehouses and factories, shots rang out. The car continued driving. The president was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead. The vice president was sworn into office as Jackie Kennedy, in a trance, watched without speaking, her husband’s blood still on her coat.
Almost immediately, a single gunman was arrested and charged with the crime. But this man, Harold Silver, insisted he was nothing more than a patsy. Before he could say anything else, a local businessman shot Silver twice in the head, in the police station no less, killing him immediately.
Those were the facts. For everything else, a vast assortment of conspiracy theories attempted to fill in the gaps. Every day, a new organization was supposedly involved in the shooting. Every hour, someone was going to the newspapers, saying they knew someone who knew someone who might have been involved. And every minute, people were reminded that the days of Camelot were over.
The first thing people called into question were the number of shots that had been fired. Spectators gathered by North Broadway insisted they heard at least six shots. Some thought they might have heard up to eight or nine shots. Authorities insisted this couldn’t be true because if it were, there would be no way for Harold Silver to have been the only gunman. And since he was the only gunman, the police repeated that only three or four shots had been fired, no matter what a hundred witnesses said they heard.
Some onlookers came forward and said they not only heard at least eight shots, but they actually saw a second gunman. People who were watching the motorcade from the east side of North Broadway saw a man, with what initially appeared to be a broom, standing behind some bushes. After the shooting, though, they saw him quickly disassemble the item he was holding, put it into a duffel bag, and run into an alley. People on the west side of North Broadway saw a different man pointing a rifle out of the window of a warehouse, two buildings down the street from the one where Harold Silver took his shots. Accounts of these other shooters were never taken seriously by law enforcement, though, which never tried to find out who the men might have been.
When people saw pictures of the wounds suffered by the president, common sense told them bullets had to have been coming from more than one location. It simply wasn’t possible for one bullet to enter at a downward angle, another to exit at a side angle, and another to hit the back of the man who was sitting in front of the president. This was when the medical examiners, after meeting with government officials, decided the bullets had bounced around after hitting their targets, making it possible for them to all come from one gun.
And then, of course, there was Silver. The government had taught him how to shoot. He had ties to the CIA. He insisted he was a scapegoat. Conveniently, he was killed before he could say anything else. These things sounded awfully suspicious. The government, though, dismissed all of this talk as nonsense.
The new president put together a task force to write an official report of what had happened. The commission consisted mainly of U.S. congressmen, but for some reason, a former president of the World Bank was also a member. As was Allen Dulles, who only two years earlier had left his position as Director of Central Intelligence because Kennedy couldn’t trust him. The public was told these men would get down to the truth of what had happened.
As everyone knew it would, the report declared that Silver was in fact the lone shooter. The hundred witnesses that saw another gunman were just confused. Those same witnesses and all the others who heard more than four shots were also confused. And lastly, Silver’s bullets had caused the wounds to the back, front, and side of the president because the damned things kept bouncing all over the place. The entire episode was the result of one man. There was no government cover-up. Everything was that simple.
Winston didn’t waste time trying to prevent the assassination by going through what that report said. His time would be better spent going by the pure facts. JFK was going to be assassinated in Chicago on November 3. He would be shot after his caravan turned from Waveland Avenue onto North Broadway.
That was what he had to stop.
But where to start? It wouldn’t be as easy as alerting the Chicago Police Department that a man named Harold Silver was going to harm the president. Everyone knew how, in the days leading up to Kennedy’s visit, the police had been inundated with threats, too many to follow up on. Even specifically mentioning Silver was pointless. The FBI supposedly already knew who he was and had a file on him.
He decided his best bet was actually to listen to the hundreds of witnesses that the government’s report had discounted. A second gunman, they said, would be located behind some bushes two buildings over from the factory where Silver would be set up. A third gunman would be shooting from the same position along the road, but would be sitting at one of the top floors of a warehouse on the opposite side of the street. These were the things he would focus on in order to alter the Theta Timeline.
After leaving the police station seven years earlier, he had only spent five months playing the life that Jesse Cantrou had made for himself. He slept on Jesse’s bed. He repaved Jesse’s chipped driveway. Those were the easy parts. When he went to work at the rock quarry, managing three shifts of men, he quickly found that being the foreman wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Under the guise of amnesia, had to be retrained on how to perform all of Jesse’s duties. But even after he “re-learned” the job, his men looked at him as if he was different from the man they had known. “Broke my nose,” he told them, pointing to the crooked edge, but they only nodded and kept their thoughts to themselves. When he offered to babysit for Jesse’s neighbors, the way Jesse and his wife supposedly had whenever their neighbor’s usual babysitter called off sick, the couple declined. “Are you sure?” he said, and the husband and wife thanked him and cancelled their plans that night.
Everyone, it seemed, accepted him as Jesse Cantrou, but deep down all of them knew something was different about him.
When he wasn’t living Jesse’s life, he was gathering information, trying to form a plan for how to stop the shooters. In the back of his head, everything was about November 3, 1963 and stopping what was going to happen.
&
nbsp; After five months, he told the few friends he had that he was ready to move on and do something new. “Too many old memories in that house,” he said.
Each person he said this to mentioned how they could tell he had never been quite the same after his wife’s death. He accepted this with silence, which made these people feel even worse for him. A woman from next door felt so bad for him that she hugged him, cried, and blabbered that everything would be better one day. After a minute of her crying on his shoulder, he politely excused himself. Her husband, also struck by how inconsolable Jesse must be, spent a weekend helping Winston pack all of his possessions into a moving truck.
In Chicago, it was easy getting a job as a warehouse manager. After all, Jesse’s many years of experience as a foreman ensured Winston was the best candidate for the position. What wasn’t easy, though, was getting the job as the warehouse manager at one of the buildings that would be used by the shooters during JFK’s visit. He had to settle for the building next to the one where Silver would take his shots because it was the only one on North Broadway looking for a new manager.
Over the next six years, he built friendships, accrued favors, and made a good reputation for himself.
At night, when the day shift was gone and the evening shift was just getting started, Winston, as Jesse Cantrou, would climb the steps leading from the top floor of the warehouse to the warehouse roof and gaze out at the view that was offered of North Broadway. Growing up, watching the footage of the assassination, he had seen the street hundreds of times, remembered the brick building in the background as the president’s head jerked backwards, could close his eyes and see the vague shapes of onlookers with their backs to the camera as the motorcade passed by them.
The Theta Prophecy Page 15
