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.
22 – A Huge Mistake
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.
23 – A Plan
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.
24 – Attempt One: Failed
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.”
&nbs
p; “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.”
The Theta Prophecy Page 16