The Theta Prophecy (16 page)

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.

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.

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.

But now, as he looked out at the street from the rooftop, the scene bore no resemblance to the clip he had watched so many times. The street he was looking at was empty. Instead of a motorcade, the streetlights shone down on bags of trash, cars parked illegally, and at least one homeless man on each block. All of these things, even the poor people without homes, would be moved away before the president arrived so a cleaner version of the city could be presented.

It was more than a simple series of missing objects; it was the viewpoint that being on the roof afforded him. He could see the intersection where the motorcade would turn off of Waveland Avenue and onto North Broadway. As soon as they did, the cars would be traveling along a straight line, perfect for an assassination. He saw the bushes on the other side of the street, where witnesses said they saw a man disassemble something, put it into a duffel bag, and run. But from the roof, the bushes seemed like mere shrubs, not the dense collection of trees that were described in the government’s report when they said it would be impossible for someone to shoot from there. And, most importantly, he saw just how many different windows faced North Broadway, how many different places there would be for gunmen to set up their rifles and aim.

He was in the right place and time. He knew when and how the assassination was going to take place. All he had to do was stop it. But looking out at the street, he knew it wasn’t a task that one man could hope to accomplish by himself.

Year: 1963

Transcript of White House Call on June 4

John F. Kennedy: Hello, William. I trust you’re getting along okay.

William M Martin: I am, Mr. President. I’m doing very well indeed. What gives me the honor of speaking with you today?

JFK: Well, I know you’re probably pleased about Executive Order 11110 being signed into law.

WM: Very please, indeed. I’m glad you’re coming around, Mr. President.

JFK: That’s the thing. I’ve had a change of heart. I wanted to let you know, personally, that we are taking our money back.

Silence

JFK: Are you there, William? Did you hear me?

WM: I heard you, Mr. President.

JFK: No longer will the Fed be charging us interest to use its money. That system has put every government that has ever used it into debt, made its politicians act not according to the country’s best interest, but to the best interests of the people who lend it money. It’s time for the country to get its own printing presses going.

Silence

WM: I strongly urge you to reconsider.

JFK: It’s too late, William. I gave you every chance to give me the information I wanted concerning that other matter we’ve spoken about. Private interests should not have the authority to print our money and charge us interest for it.

WM: This won’t work.

JFK: It will work. And it’s what’s best for the people and for the country.

WM: This is a huge mistake.

JFK: No, William, it’s not. The mistake was in not getting me the information when I asked for it. That was the mistake.

Silence

WM: Is that all, Mr. President?

JFK: Yes, that’s all.

Year: 1963

Winston knew one of the gunmen would position himself on the street, twenty yards behind a group of onlookers. The gunman wouldn’t be able to hide there, though, or anywhere else along the street if all the bushes were gone. Without asking any of the building owners for permission, he had called in some favors and paid a crew to remove all of the shrubbery, fences, and anything else along that section of North Broadway.

With nowhere to hide and little time to change their plans, the first gunman would have to rely on the other two shooters to complete the mission.

“What’re they doing?” one of Winston’s workers said.

“Tearing everything out.”

“Why?”

“It’ll make the entire area look nicer when the president visits,” he said.

Prior to that, in the week leading up to the president’s visit, Winston paid each homeless man along North Broadway five dollars a day—a fortune back when a gallon of gas cost thirty cents and a gallon of milk was less than fifty cents—to move their boxes and shopping carts from the front of each building to the parking lots in back, and asking them to keep an eye out for anyone suspicious.

He knew the men could take his money and run, but where would they go? They were homeless, after all. And second, they appreciated being given responsibility, feeling important again, even if it was only a small task and only for a week. Day after day, the men had nothing to report, though, and Winston—or Jesse Cantrou as they knew him—began to think the local homeless population was making a fool of him.

Then, two days before JFK’s visit, one of the men signaled to Winston from across the street.

“Yeah?” he said, sure the man was going to ask for tomorrow’s payment early.

“A man was here last night. Jimmied his way into that there warehouse.” The vagrant pointed to the building directly across the street from the one where Jesse Cantrou was the foreman. “I could see him walking around because of his flashlight.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Top floor. Looked around for about ten minutes. Then left.”

“Thank you,” Winston said, patting the man on the shoulder. “That’s very helpful. Keep your eye out for anything else.”

The man didn’t ask for additional compensation for having done a good job. Instead, he smiled and said, “Sure thing, boss,” then shuffled back to his blanket of old newspapers behind a metal garbage can.

Later that day, another vagrant motioned to Winston as he came down the street with his lunch.

“Saw someone last night,” the man said.

“I heard. He was walking around the warehouse across the street.”

“No,
your
building,” the man said, emphasizing
your
by poking Winston’s chest with his index finger.

Winston took a step back, slightly annoyed. He had paid the man an exorbitant amount for a simple task, and all the guy did was drink it away, unable to even get his facts right. As if to confirm these suspicions, the man coughed into his fist and then looked down, surprised at the mucus on his knuckles, which he wiped on his sleeve.

But then the man matched the step forward that Winston had taken backward and whispered, “Last night, around three o’clock. A man circled your building, checking each door to see if one was unlocked.”

“You don’t even own a watch. How would you know what time it was?”

“Mr. Thomas’s bread,” the man said, pointing to the bakery three buildings down the street, which caused the entire rest of the surrounding area to smell glorious each morning, “is trucked out every morning at three thirty. The man was at your warehouse a little before that.”

Winston had to admit that the homeless man was thinking clearly; the bakery did start trucking out its bread each day at three thirty in the morning. But the only problem, which he told the vagrant, was that his warehouse had a security guard who walked the entire premises for the few hours between the evening shift’s departure and the morning shift’s arrival.

“Mr. Saker,” the homeless man laughed, referring to Winston’s security guard. “I hear exactly where he goes. He coughs louder than I do. Snores louder than I do, too.”

Winston rubbed his chin. He was surprised the local vagrants were aware of so much. Not only did they know the name of his security guard, they knew he was too old to perform the job reliably. And if they knew, it wouldn’t be difficult for someone like Harold Silver to find out as well.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. The guy I saw couldn’t find an unlocked door, so he unscrewed the doorknob and lock.”

Winston groaned. It was amazing how inadequate security measures had been before he was born.

The man said, “He was always on a different floor than Mr. Saker, which was easy, because Saker was snoring most of the time anyway. When the robber was done, he screwed the lock back together and left.”

“Thanks,” Winston said and walked away to form a plan.

The strategy he came up with was nothing fancy. Although each warehouse along North Broadway was going to be closed the day of the president’s visit, Winston convinced the other building managers to hire a security guard that day anyway, when they would normally only have one working at night.

“Save you all the hassle of some drunks getting rowdy and breaking a window or something,” he told them, everyone knowing how hostile some people were toward the young president.

In addition to that, and without telling any of the other building managers, he hired a locksmith company to go around to each door at his warehouse, the warehouse next to his, and both on the other side of the street—eighteen doors in all—and have their best locks installed.

People began to gather on the streets, setting their picnic chairs down along the roadside in preparation for the president’s motorcade. A loud bang went off. He looked down at the sidewalk where a boy was jumping up and down in a burst of energy. It was only a balloon popping underneath the boy’s feet.

A car’s engine sounded. Was JFK here earlier than planned? He looked up North Broadway and saw the street still closed off to all traffic. The engine trailed off—someone trying to get away from the mass of people by using the side streets, most likely.

From his vantage point, Winston tried to find who the shooters might be, see if they had found any other places to hide and wait for the ambush. Everyone looked the same, though. It wasn’t as if three men in black suits were hiding in the shadows while everyone else wore khaki pants along the sidewalk. Amongst the masses of people gathered along the street, he could very well be looking at a man or a group of men who were there to kill the president and he would never know it until they opened fire.

He looked down at his watch. Two more minutes.

A pair of men began to argue outside one of the factories on the other side of the street. Was this a diversion, a way to distract everyone along the parade route while the real gunman broke an office window and pointed his rifle out toward the street? A police officer got in between the two men, made them shake hands, and then all three of them went in different directions.

The first engine could be heard. A moment later, a series of engines. The motorcade was here. And then he saw it with his own eyes. The president’s car, the second of three black cars, turned off of Waveland Avenue and onto North Broadway.

“Dear God, please let this work,” he mumbled.

He imagined the gunmen getting to their designated office buildings, finding the locks changed, and laughing. A locked door wouldn’t keep a professional killer from carrying out his job. But there were also security guards, and no trees to provide cover.

The cars were approaching.

Another balloon popped. This time, instead of flinching, he swore under his breath that he would gladly go back in time and murder whoever had created such an annoying thing.

The cars were only a hundred feet away. He held his breath.

A moment later, the cars were directly underneath him. JFK was smiling and waving to the people along the right side of the car while Jackie waved to people on the other side. Winston became sick to his stomach, knowing this was the moment when the president’s head would explode.

The cars were a hundred feet past his building. He let out a long sigh. In the distance, he could still see JFK’s arm as it waved to everyone nearby.

His plan had worked. He had changed the Theta Timeline. After another hundred feet, he lost sight of the motorcade and collapsed to the ground, shaking.

For a minute, he closed his eyes and let the feeling of bliss wash over him. He had done the very thing he had set out to do. But he couldn’t stop just yet. He paid the same locksmith company to remove all the locks he had hired them to put on only hours earlier, all without any of the building owners ever knowing they had been there. He tipped each security guard and thanked them for working on a day when everyone else was enjoying the president’s visit.

And just like that, the Theta Timeline had shifted. JFK wasn’t assassinated in Chicago on November 3, 1963, the way everyone grew up knowing he had been. A nation didn’t grieve.

Winston’s job was done. The president was saved. A significant step in preserving the country’s hope had been achieved. An important step in preventing corruption and tyranny had been completed. As Winston drank the first of many beers that night, he offered a silent toast to his family and to the better life they would now have.

Of course, the delusion would only last for a few euphoric hours before reality set in.