“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.
25 – Tampa
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 presiden
t’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.
26 – Attempt Two: Failed
Year: 1963
This time, when the phone rang, McCone thought about not only allowing it to ring forever but also about writing up a resignation letter and dropping it at his secretary’s desk on the way out of the building.
The attempt in Tampa hadn’t gone any better than the one in Chicago. And that was putting it politely. Even he had to admit the second attempt had not only gone worse than the first, by any measure it had to be considered a complete disaster. It wasn’t as bad as the Bay of Pigs, in which the CIA had been willing to make itself look like a pack of bumbling idiots at the greater embarrassment to the president, but only because this blunder wasn’t public knowledge. It also wasn’t as bad as the project to give unwitting subjects doses of LSD just to see their reactions, only to have one of them kill himself. That, too, was still a secret, but when the media heard about it they would have a field day. McCone hoped to be long gone from the agency by the time that happened.
Although this flub wasn’t as bad as either of those, he still wanted to avoid the conversation he knew was coming. At least those operations had been before his time. He had inherited their legacy but hadn’t been responsible for them. This time, just like in Chicago, he was the man ultimately in charge of ensuring the mission was a success. And, just like in Chicago, the president had emerged unharmed. Not a single shot had been fired. But now, even worse than in Chicago, two members of the team had been detained by Tampa police after anonymous tips alerted the local authorities to their suspicious activities.
It had taken some fast action and some major string pulling to get those men out of the police station, along with any record that they had been there, especially before people started asking questions. If by chance someone from one of the papers had spotted the men and started poking around, the entire thing could have fallen apart.
After getting out of jail and being taken back to a safe house, the men reported that there were not only locks on the doors that hadn’t been there previously, but also a noxious gas in each room. Even if they could have set up where they were supposed to, they would have needed breathing masks to see clearly, which they didn’t have.
Someone knew.
The phone rang again. How many times was that now? Six? Seven?
Through his office window, he saw his secretary looking at him with a strained smile. She could hear his private line ringing. Did she assume something bad was going on or did she already know it for a fact?
With one fist clenched, holding his breath, he picked up the phone.
“Just listen to me,” Martin said, not waiting for introductions or excuses or anything else. “I don’t want to hear about why the operation was a failure or about who called in the tips or why in God’s green earth some of your men were arrested.”
Tips? Arrested men? McCone wondered how someone outside the agency already knew about all of this.
Martin said, “I don’t want to hear about any of that. All I want to hear is that our goal will be accomplished during the next event. The third time’s the charm, right?”
McCone looked at his copy of the president’s itinerary. Immediately after leaving Tampa, JFK was flying to Dallas, Texas. That meant McCone had two days to get a team in place, get them set up, and execute what two other teams had already failed to do, all without getting caught and bringing anything back on the agency. It wasn’t possible.
“Sir, I—”
But he was already being interrupted before he could explain that he needed more time. And when the hell had he started calling his peer—a man everyone else in Washington would see as his equal—“sir?”
“I don’t want to hear it. All you have to do is get a team together. Get them in place. I’ll have my own men there to make sure the operation is a success this time.”
“Sir, I—”
“If my suspicions are correct, this is exactly what I have feared, and in that case there was nothing you could have done to be successful in the first mission. The book has foretold of this sort of thing. In a way, I hope that is the case because then it means your men may actually get it right this time.”
What was McCone supposed to say to that? Thank you? And what was Martin talking about, that his suspicions were correct? Did he really think someone might have traveled back from the future to prevent what they were trying to do?
The Fed chairman said, “I’ll have men there to spot this individual, if he really exists. You just do your part and keep your fingers crossed that you get it done this time.”
What squad of men did Martin have at his disposal? He didn’t work for law enforcement. He didn’t have the military at his beck and call. He didn’t even have black teams, as McCone referred to them, the men who went in, no questions asked, and assassinated whomever they were told to, whether a foreign leader, a nosy reporter, or whomever else needed to be silenced.
“Listen here,” McCone said, “I’ll need to know if another team will be operating near my guys so there’s no confusion.” It didn’t take a lot of experience to know that having too many cooks in the kitchen was a good way for all of them to get burned.
He didn’t get an answer.
“Hello?” he said. “Hello?” But the other man had already hung up.
It would never work, McCone told himself. Not enough time to prepare. Not enough reliable men in place to use for the operation. Too many unknowns. Even if they did manage to kill JFK, he was sure the operation would be messy. With so little time to get set up, the shooters would either make it obvious that a single man hadn’t acted alone or else bystanders would actually spot the other gunmen.
It was an approaching disaster, but it was also inevitable. McCone couldn’t quit right now. Not like this. The entire thing would fall on him. He knew how things like this worked. If he did want to resign, he could do so after the operation was a success. Not until then.
He envisioned Dulles, his predecessor, sitting at home with his wife, enjoying the
sunset or perhaps listening to flocks of geese as they flew past. One of the men had made the right choice and one of them had not. It was obvious which was which.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he reopened them, he flipped through a folder with the names of everyone he had at his disposal who was located in the Gulf Coast area. He needed at least six men. With only two days to prepare, he considered using even more. He found a logistics man he had used during an operation in Central America. That was one. He found a pair of sharpshooters who had just come back from picking off targets in the jungles of South America. That was two and three. He found a lookout and a driver, both unproven, but nearby. That was four and five. He needed another shooter.
On the fifth and final page of names, he reviewed the candidates who were, for one reason or another, no longer deemed reliable. These were men who either had criminal records, ties to other countries, or personal problems. Or, in the case of the man he chose, all three.
Lee Harvey Oswald. He would be assigned the role of Member 1, the man who would take the blame for everything. McCone would kill two birds with one stone. He would have his sixth and final team member and he would get rid of someone who had burned too many bridges.
Poor Oswald, McCone thought. The guy had no idea it was supposed to have been Harold Silver, in a completely different city, who would be blamed for one of the worst days in the country’s history.
And like that, the Theta Timeline shifted once more.
27 - Dallas
Year: 1963
The day after JFK’s motorcade drove through the Tampa streets without any problems, Winston flew to Dallas. Once again, the parade route was published ahead of the president’s visit, and once again he was able to find a strip of warehouses and other buildings that would provide ideal hiding spots for the snipers. This time, they were located adjacent to a large Dallas park area called Dealey Plaza. As he had done in Chicago and Tampa, Winston bought locks and pepper spray and scouted the area.
The Theta Prophecy Page 17
