One thing was for sure: he was too old for this.
19 – Finding Out Who You Are
Year: 1956
They fingerprinted him. They took his mug shot. They did this even though he wasn’t under arrest and wasn’t being charged with any crime.
“Sorry, buddy,” one of the police officers said. “Protocol.”
“I guess this saves you guys time if I ever come back, huh?” Winston said, offering a smile.
“Turn to your left,” the cop said, not returning the pleasantries.
What’s the point of a mug shot when I have a bruised and swollen forehead and a pack of gauze holding my nose in place, he thought. But the cop was doing what he had been told to do so Winston kept silent in hopes that less talk would mean getting on with his new life more quickly.
Somewhere, in a different part of the police station, a woman was yelling that the cops had no right to treat her this way, whatever “this way” was. Even without seeing her, Winston could tell by the way she slurred all of her consonants that she was roaring drunk. A few men, Winston couldn’t see them either, whistled each time the lady yelled curses at the cops, egging her on, until one of the officers demanded that everyone shut up.
The cop standing in front of Winston seemed not to notice any of the commotion in the other part of the jail. When the time traveler turned to his left as he had been told, another flash went off and the mug shots were complete.
He had not given his name as Winston or anything else. He was entered into their filing system simply as John Doe. They measured his height and weight, recorded the color of his hair and eyes.
“Sorry, more protocol,” one of the cops said. “Just in case we get a call from Los Angeles in a week saying someone matching your description hacked off his wife’s head.” The cop laughed after he said this, as if women had their heads taken from them in Los Angeles on a regular basis. The Black Dahlia case had happened almost ten years earlier, but it had left a lingering stain on the area, giving Hollywood one of its first blemishes and becoming a part of pop culture.
Even so, Winston was happy to go through whatever process they wanted if it meant he was one step closer to changing history.
It was only a procedure to register that a man with no identity had been there, but he couldn’t help noticing how similar it was to the process the Tyranny would eventually go through to intimidate anyone who would dare think about stepping out of line. Say something when one of the Tyranny’s men groped your wife or daughter at a checkpoint? Question why the Tyranny’s laws applied to everyone except the Tyranny’s friends? Point out that anyone is more qualified to lead the country than the leaders? Do any of these things and you were sent to one of the Tyranny’s security stations, your prints and mug shot taken. Except then, instead of being let go, you were left in a cell indefinitely. If you were lucky (if you had learned your lesson), you were released the next day. If you were unlucky (if you threatened to press charges or tell people about what had happened to you), the guards said you resisted arrest once they got you to the station and they were forced to protect themselves by blasting you ten times. The same thing happened if you didn’t answer every single question the security services asked you, no matter how embarrassing or irrelevant they were. Really, the Tyranny could drag you away for any reason it wanted. If anyone else complained, they were dragged away as well.
Luckily for Winston, those things still wouldn’t be common practice for about another four generations.
“Have a seat,” the cop said once they were done creating a file for him and after he had been escorted to a private room. “Someone will be with you in a moment. Can I get you any water or some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
A minute later, a man in khaki pants and a short sleeve button-up shirt came in with a stack of folders.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Detective Marshall,” the cop said, dropping the folders so they made a loud bang on the table.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Winston said, but Marshall was already flipping through the folder with all of Winston’s John Doe information that the other cop had left behind.
“So the clinic gave you a clean bill of health?”
“I guess you can call it that. They looked for every possible reason to keep me there. When they couldn’t find one, they let me go.”
“That sounds about right,” the detective said, frowning and scratching his chin. “Well anyhow, you made it.”
“But what if I hadn’t?” Winston wanted to say. Why were so many people willing to turn a blind eye to possible injustices rather than making sure they didn’t happen? How many other men, of sound mind and body, were rotting away in insane asylums and prisons just because people like the good doctor wanted to have a new pet or because companies increased their profits with each additional offender they housed? Why weren’t the newspapers questioning these things? Was that where the first roots of the Tyranny started, with silently pretended obliviousness rather than with AeroCams in the sky?
Was the best way to change the Theta Timeline to get people to stand up for injustices when they first happened rather than letting small infractions—an initial abuse of authority, a war with false pretenses—turn into people being dragged away in the streets, reporters intimidated for writing stories the Tyranny didn’t like? Was the real path to changing the future not in changing the leaders, because leaders would always fall to the lowest common denominator, but in changing people, because when people were changed, leaders had to as well or else they wouldn’t have a job?
The detective was staring at him.
“I’m sorry, what?” Winston said, blinking back into the room he was sitting in.
“I said, you don’t remember anything?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“Well, this is going to take a while then,” Marshall said, shuffling his chair around closer to where Winston was sitting, then pulling the stack of files to rest between them.
Winston had no idea what was going to be in the folders until the detective opened the first one. On top was an 8x10 black and white photograph of a man, stapled to a stack of papers.
“I went through ahead of time and filtered out the ones who obviously weren’t you from the description I was given.”
The very first folder was of a man with blond hair. Winston ran a hand through his black hair.
“Yeah,” the detective said, “I know. But hair color is easy to change. Focus more on the rest of him. And even more than the picture—” he gestured at Winston’s broken nose and swollen face “because you aren’t looking your best today, no offense—read through the bio for each man and see if it triggers any memories.”
“Who are these people?”
“These are the people who went missing in the last three months and were never found.”
“That’s a lot of folders,” Winston said, surprised at how many men fitting his basic age and height were missing from just one city.
The detective shrugged. “It’s a crazy world.”
Winston flipped through the summary page of the first man’s life. The man had been out of work in the months leading up to his disappearance, had a history of petty theft and public drunkenness, and had a wife and two kids. It was exactly the opposite of what Winston was looking for.
What he needed, what all Thinkers relied upon when being sent back in time, was someone’s life who could give him a chance for upward mobility, the chance to gain authority and favors, so that when the time came, he could be in a position to change the course of history. Bums with drinking problems, criminal histories, or a family who would know he wasn’t the man he was pretending to be, were all automatic no’s.
What he was looking for was someone who had accrued a certain amount of prestige or wealth before disappearing, who was an upstanding citizen or, if that wasn’t an option, at least someone who had been anonymous in society. Someone who had either no family members or only a few distant rel
atives so no one would become suspicious at their loved one’s suddenly different eye color, dislike of sports, or fascination with complex math.
“Definitely not this guy,” Winston said, closing the first folder and moving onto the next.
This folder showed a man with black hair and dark eyes who could look like Winston if he squinted. The man had no family and had disappeared during a fishing trip, which was perfect. But Winston noticed the man was listed as having a pair of tattoos on his back, a scar under his chin, and a chip in his front tooth. Winston had no tattoos. His chin had never been cut. And even though his nose was broken and his face was swollen, his teeth were fine. If he claimed to be this man, the detective would never buy it.
Pretending to ignore this information and focus on the man’s life rather than physical traits that would ruin him, Winston said, “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“This is going to take forever,” Detective Marshall said. “I’m going to get some coffee. Can I get you some?”
“That would be great, thanks.”
With the detective gone, Winston could give up the pretense of acting as if information on each page might jog his memory and simply run through the key details he needed: a physical resemblance without any identifying marks, a missing person with no family or criminal history, and preferably one with a decent job. He raced through folder after folder, scanning the pages of each man’s life. Ten seconds after opening a folder, he was done and moving onto the next.
It wasn’t long before he found what he was looking for. The photograph showed a man with bushy hair and a beard, but Winston could easily say he had shaved the facial hair and gotten a haircut. In fact, the difference would make it easier for anyone who had known the man to believe he could look different than they remembered since they were used to seeing him scraggly. But even better was the line in the bio saying that the man’s only family had been his wife, who had also disappeared in the waters off San Francisco. He had no criminal history, nothing to keep Winston from taking over the man’s life and running with it. And best of all, the man had a decent job as the foreman at a rock quarry thirty minutes east of San Francisco. Jesse Cantrou.
He would become Jesse Cantrou.
He closed the folder and moved it underneath the next one in the stack, then waited patiently for Detective Marshall to re-enter the room and find his guest carefully poring over some other man’s life. As soon as they were sitting down again, sipping their coffee, Winston would close that folder, open the next one as if it were any other, and start remembering a life that had never been his.
“Thank you,” he said, taking the coffee that Marshall offered him.
“Find yourself yet?”
“I wish, but no.”
He closed the folder of the man he had been looking at, moved it over to the stack of folders he had reviewed, and opened the next one.
After a moment, he said, “This sounds familiar.”
The detective reached over and grabbed the file, not because he didn’t trust Winston, but because he was excited at the prospect of not having to sit in this room all day with a John Doe.
“Is there anything in there about working with his hands? Working outside?” Winston said.
“There is! He was a foreman at a rock quarry.”
“And I have a wife?” he said, smiling at the thought of someone he had planned to spend the rest of his life with.
The detective looked over the file, finding the place where it mentioned Jesse had disappeared with his wife in the rough waters and she had never been found.
“You are married,” Marshall said. “But I have some unfortunate news.”
Winston looked up at the detective with wide eyes, readying himself for the information that would have devastated the real-life Jesse. When he heard what the detective had to say, he didn’t try to burst into a fit of rage, throwing over his chair and screaming, “No! No! It’s not fair.” He merely put his head into his hands and slumped forward, trying to remember all the people he really had lost, albeit to the Tyranny, not to boat accidents. Losses were losses nonetheless.
“Can I have a moment?”
“Of course,” Detective Marshall said. “Of course you can. Whenever you’re ready, just come out and we’ll drive you to your house. I’ll take you there myself.” At the doorway, he added, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and then he was gone.
Winston remained in the room for another few minutes, not grieving over the woman who had surely died with her husband a couple miles off the coast of San Francisco, but thinking about what he would do once he got to Jesse’s house, his house, and what he would do the following day and the day after that.
In seven years, JFK would be assassinated and the Tyranny would be one step closer to becoming a reality. He needed to start thinking about what he would do to prevent it.
20 – The New Director
Year: 1961
“How are you settling in?” Martin asked.
The Fed Chairman rarely left his office unless he was summoned to testify before Congress, and was especially uncomfortable walking through a Washington, D.C. park in the December cold.
“I’m getting along okay. My wife is still smarting, though, from the things some of those bastards have mentioned they’ll bring up during my confirmation hearings.”
Martin offered a polite chuckle as if he had never heard Congress disparaged before. The fact was that everyone he spoke with on walks such as this said the same thing, and yet nothing ever changed.
As they walked past rows of cherry trees, their branches bare until spring arrived, only a pair of joggers oblivious to the cold, and a young couple too in love to realize they were shivering, passed by them. None of these people recognized Martin or the man he was walking beside.
“There’s a special circle in Dante’s hell for the whole lot,” Martin said. “Half of them are on the take and too intoxicated with their own ideology to realize they’re the very definition of corruption, and the other half are on the take and wholeheartedly embrace their corruption. It’s a shame they’re a necessary evil.”
“How do you mean?”
“The two sides play against each other, giving everyone a team to root for and another team to blame all their troubles on. Meanwhile, nothing changes, but all the attention is on them, leaving men like you and I to do as we please.”
But John McCone, the new Director of Central Intelligence, wasn’t ready to acknowledge they were a circus worth seeing: “That asshole from New York has the gall to lecture me about a drunk driving ticket I got in college. That was almost forty years ago. He killed a woman with his car! Last year! Hypocritical asshole. But of course I can’t say that.” Then, after spitting in the snow, he added, “Prick.”
McCone’s white hair made him look like he was old enough to be his predecessor’s father. But whereas Dulles, especially toward the end, had suffered from a lack of vitality, McCone sounded and acted like he was still young enough to throw fists with anyone who scuffed his shoes.
“Forget about our good friend from New York and the rest of them. You’ll be confirmed soon enough. You run one of the most powerful agencies in the entire world.”
“I have to admit, I was surprised when the president nominated me. Someone up there,” McCone said, looking up at the clouds, “must be watching out for my career.”
The Fed Chairman couldn’t help but close his eyes and smile for a moment. There were congressmen who went their entire lives without realizing they were only elected because they served a purpose that rich men needed of them—all it took was exorbitant amounts of money in newspaper advertisements, street posters, and highway billboards and their man was sure to win. These were the men who felt lucky to have a position of power and would do anything it took to keep it. There were political appointees who were in a similar situation. Many of them never realized that while they were appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress, they were no different from the hired goons sitt
ing in the Capitol Building.
After all, someone was responsible for handing the president a list of candidates so he could select one of them. And while the candidates often seemed like a nice mix of beliefs and backgrounds, they all had one thing in common: they were only offered up as potential candidates because someone else had already vetted them, not for competence or for a shared ideology, but for loyalty to the people who wielded real influence. Four candidates for the Secretary of the Treasury and each one with ties to the country’s largest banks. Three candidates for the Secretary of Defense and all three on the board of directors at a large military contractor. Yet this was never pointed out.
The people who followed the news always wondered why nothing ever changed in Washington even though a new president was elected every four or eight years, often from the opposite party, bringing with him a list of new appointees. It wasn’t because the people who were elected didn’t have their own thoughts on how things should be run. They did. It was because the men who surrounded the president, offering advice and policy support, would tell him that doing anything other than the status quo would have dire consequences and then offer a list of reasons why. Each president learned his role quickly enough.
A room full of men, all with ties to the three largest banks, would tell the president why financial institutions shouldn’t be held to the same standards as other companies, and it would become reality. A room full of men, all with stock in the four largest military contractors, would say why it was critical to covertly overthrow this or that government while also secretly providing weapons to its neighbor, and that too would become reality. These were the things McCone would come to understand in time.
Every once in a while, though, as was happening now, a president came into power who really believed he was working for the good of the people. Wars were an absolute last resort. Everyone should play by the same rules, rich and poor alike. The American Dream was made possible because Americans were the greatest people. It was enough to make Martin roll his eyes and wonder how the population could have been so stupid to vote the New Englander into office in the first place.
The Theta Prophecy Page 14