Soon, he knew, he would have to come up with a different way to stop these men. Locks and pepper spray wouldn’t stop assassins forever. They would adapt and, even with a Thinker trying to keep JFK alive, they would eventually succeed due to possessing greater resources and materials.
Four hours before the motorcade was scheduled to pass by Dealey Plaza, he got out of his rental car, threw one duffel bag over each shoulder, and began walking toward the first warehouse.
Right before he got to the rear door of the three-story brick structure, a man called out, “Hey do you know where the closest bus stop is?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not from around here,” Winston said, as he turned to look at the man.
It was a police officer who was asking. Winston’s first thought was why a cop would need to find a bus stop when he must have a patrol car. Then a slew of other questions bombarded him: Shouldn’t the cop be familiar with the area and know exactly where every bus stop was? Why didn’t the cop have a name on his uniform? Where had the cop appeared from?
The police officer was looking at the two bags slung around Winston’s shoulders. He had a tiny photograph in his hand, a man’s portrait, which he held out so Winston could see it. It was him. His mug shot from years earlier in San Francisco. Him with a broken nose and a gash on his forehead, but clearly him.
“Hey, you’re that guy who lost his memory, right?” the man said. “Jesse Cantrou.”
Winston was too confused to say yes or no or to ask any of the questions that were overwhelming him.
The man took a step forward, looked at Winston’s flat nose where the doctor had reset it, then back at the photograph of the man with the bandaged nose and said, “Yeah, that’s a nose that’s been broken.”
Winston, still facing the cop, was so confused that his head fell to one side as he stared, open-mouthed, at the man in front of him.
The cop took another step forward. That was when Winston realized the uniform was not only missing the officer’s last name, the badge on the uniform was plastic and didn’t say “Dallas” anywhere on it.
“Weren’t you in Tampa a couple days ago?” the cop said. “Then in Chicago before that? I bet if I look in those bags I’ll find locks and canisters of gas, right?”
But before Winston could say anything, the man raised his right hand. A gun was there, pointed at him.
A terrible force punched Winston in the chest. He didn’t even remember falling backward to the ground. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t breathe.
“I tried my best,” he wanted to tell his parents and brother and everyone else he loved, but no words could be found, and no way to send them to the people who needed them.
The cop was standing over him, aiming the gun at his face. Then nothingness.
Later that day, as a country mourned and hundreds of men descended upon Dallas to try and figure out what had happened, a body was found in a dumpster, only blocks away from where JFK was assassinated. No one had seen the man before. When his picture was shown that night on the few minutes of the news that weren’t dedicated to the assassination, people were asked to call the police if they knew who the man was. No one did.
And once again, the Theta Timeline had shifted. No longer would kids grow up seeing the president die in Chicago as they once had, although that reality still existed out there along with every other possible reality. Nor would they see grainy footage of JFK being killed as he passed by crowds of onlookers in Tampa. Now, the Theta Timeline had shifted to one in which the president had been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
28 – We Got Our Man
Year: 1963
This time, when the phone rang, McCone smiled and picked it up before it could ring a second time.
“Congratulations are in order. We got our man,” Martin said.
“Yes,” McCone said slowly, grimacing, not liking how bold the Fed chairman was being. Surely, someone was listening to these calls. “Yes, we did.”
Everything had gone according to plan. Lee Harvey Oswald was already telling anyone who would listen that he was a patsy, but he would be dead soon, too. There had been people taking pictures and filming the motorcade as it passed through Dealey Plaza. McCone had sent teams around the city to retrieve any of the film before it could be developed. It couldn’t have gone better. Even so, it was out of character for Martin to say anything on the phone that might incriminate him.
But the Fed chairman seemed unconcerned. “Oh, that. Yes, you did well, too,” he said.
McCone turned down the volume of the television in his office. All they were talking about was the assassination anyway. Some of the anchormen were even crying.
“Wait, what are you talking about?” he said.
Martin chuckled again, in a way that McCone was quickly beginning to resent. He didn’t mind when someone knew more than he did, but he did mind when it was held over his head.
“We’ve preserved the future,” Martin said, then hung up.
Part Three – The Tyranny
“There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”
The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
29 – The Top Story
Year: 2048
“Did anyone see the Security Service beating that guy outside our building?” the intern said, putting down two trays of coffee for everyone to take.
Only a month earlier, the same intern, fresh out of school from a small college in the middle of farm country, had gone running into the conference room to tell everyone that he had just seen a lady pulled out of one of the checkpoint lines. The woman had broken into screams as the Tyranny’s men dragged her away.
“She probably just happened to have the same name as someone the Tyranny is looking for,” one of the veteran reporters had said, trying to calm the intern down. “I’m sure she’ll be fine if she answers their questions and doesn’t have the bad luck of being alone in a room with one of the agents with a criminal history.”
It hadn’t made the intern feel much better about what he’d seen. But now, only a month later, he had gotten used to seeing people dragged away, beaten—even shot—because it happened every day.
Someone asked if the guy the intern had seen receiving a beating looked to be over or under forty years of age.
“Older,” the intern said.
“Damn it,” another reporter said, taking out five dollars and sliding it across the table to the guy who had won this round of the office pool.
“Okay, everyone,” Amy said, entering the room and taking the chair at the head of the table. “What do we have?”
One by one, the people seated around the large oak table told her the stories they were working on for open slots in that week’s news broadcast schedule. All around them on the walls were framed portraits of legendary reporters who had won awards for their investigative reporting.
One said, “The wedding between Tom Wildsmith and Julie Hutchins. Everyone who’s anyone is going to be there.”
The man who lost the bet said, “The flooding in the Midwest.”
Another said, “A piece on what the former Ruler is up to these days.”
“Okay,” Amy said. “I get the idea.” Then she looked at the youngest person in the room, the lowly intern, and said, “Shouldn’t we cover all the people who were killed in the streets by the Tyranny’s men?”
One woman groaned and forced her eyes shut in revulsion. The reporter who won the bet and was now five dollars richer actually chuckled. Everyone else stared at their hands without saying a word, each of them doing their best to wait until the punchline was delivered so they could laugh. When Amy, who had held the position of news editor at the station longer than anyone else, didn’t laugh, but only looked at the intern and waited for his response, everyone held their breath.
“Mayb
e?” the intern said, looking to all the other people gathered around him, wishing one of them would blink once if he was supposed to say yes or blink twice if he was supposed to say no.
“Maybe?” Amy said. “Then why don’t we normally cover that type of news?”
A man on the opposite side of the table, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, let his head rest on one of his hands and closed his eyes but said nothing. Jerry had known Amy longer than anyone else, was one of the only people who could tell her when she was wrong. Everyone else around the table depended on him to speak up now, but instead he listened to what the intern had to say.
“Because it’s not news?” the kid said.
Amy wanted to put her head in her hands and cry. Not news? It was the only thing mentioned so far that was news. She wanted to yell at all of them that they hadn’t studied journalism to do stories on celebrity weddings or any of the other things they tried to pass off as worthwhile stories.
“If it were your mother or father who was beaten to death,” she said, “wouldn’t you think it was newsworthy?”
Afraid to say anything else stupid, the intern merely nodded.
Jerry rolled his sleeves even further up his forearm and said, “Leave the poor boy alone.” He smiled and gave the kid a friendly nod.
Thirty years ago, Amy would have made the entire room tremble in their seats by roaring about what was news and what wasn’t, that they were there to provide a service to the people, that they were the one mechanism in place to keep the leaders honest. Her fire, though, had been had been put out a little bit at a time. A story that her editor refused to approve. Another story that was so thoroughly edited that the original intention of her piece was lost. For decades, she had learned what type of news was allowed and what type wasn’t, and she had put up with the game. Now, though, with two kids who were out of college and starting careers of their own, her husband dead three years earlier from a stroke, she could only shake her head and sigh.
“Two candidates running for 3rd District Leader are airing smear campaigns against each other in which they each accuse the other of being a Thinker. Why? Because they’re hoping that will give the Tyranny enough reason to drag their opponent away, or at least get no one to vote for them. Why aren’t we covering that?”
“Politics has always been dirty,” said the man with a fresh five dollar bill in his pocket.
“Yes,” Amy agreed. “But where does this end? I’m sure each of you knows someone who has been taken away by the Tyranny for being a Thinker. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. But if two leaders can accuse each other in the hope that it gets their opponent imprisoned or killed, what’s to stop Jerry”—she smiled at the man with thinning grey hair who had come to the intern’s defense—“from accusing me of being a Thinker just so he can become the news editor?”
The room was silent. Someone’s pocket beeped, a missed call or email. She waited to see whose it was so she could kick them out of the meeting, the one place they weren’t allowed to take calls or be interrupted. No one took the bait, though.
“George, scrap the story on the celebrity wedding, you’re—”
“But it’s going to be the biggest wedding of the decade!”
“You’re going to do a piece on all the beatings and killings that have taken place over, let’s say, the past month. Tell us how many of them turned out to be radicals and how many were just ordinary people accused of something they didn’t do.”
“I can’t do that. The Tyranny will think I’m against them.”
“Tell them your boss told you to do it.” Then, to the guy sitting next to her, she said, “Scrap the story on the flooding in the Midwest. People can find out the weather whenever they want. You’re going to put together a piece on how many people have been accused of being Thinkers, who accused them, why, and what happened to all of these people. Are they sitting in prison? Are they even alive anymore?”
The guy scribbled notes onto a piece of paper without saying anything.
“And, Margaret?”
The woman who was going to do a piece on what the former Ruler was doing now that he was out of office looked up from her hands and offered a pained smile. “Yes?”
“Scrap your story. No one cares what the former Ruler is doing. It’s not news. Do a story on who’s paying for all the negative ads we keep seeing on television.”
The only confirmation the woman gave that she had heard what her boss had told her was drawing a straight black line through her notes, then quickly scribbling something else.
Amy looked around the room. Half of her staff were looking down at their notepads as if something interesting was there. The other half were gazing at random spots just over her shoulder so they at least got credit for sort of looking at her. When she stood up and pushed her chair back from the conference table, everyone else did the same.
“You know,” Jerry said, walking next to her as they made their way down the hallway, “This can’t end well.” As he said this, he ran a hand through the little bit of hair he still had on top of his head.
“I’m the news director. I’m just directing the news.”
And then she went into her office, closed her door, and went back to work.
30 – Poor Bastard
Year: 2048
“What will you do?” Matheson said, as he and the Ruler stared out the windows of the Ruler’s office.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do.”
As they watched, a lone man in raggy clothes walked across the park to the front gate of the building the Ruler lived in. There, the man stopped and unfolded a piece of cardboard, which he held against the wrought iron fence.
“MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR,” the sign said. A throwback to simpler times and simpler complaints. Before the Tyranny had outlawed such things—it was a matter of time until men from the Security Services would rush out, tear the cardboard message away, and either drag the man to prison or kill him on the spot—there had been signs protesting checkpoints to get into and out of every city, posters complaining about AeroCams watching what everyone did, and banners listing all the different countries that had been turned into barren wastelands by the Tyranny’s bombs.
“Poor bastard,” the Ruler said, shaking his head.
Just as Matheson had expected, a group of four men in black armor jogged toward the protestor. The first one to get within arm’s reach of the man tore the sign down. Even with it gone, the man kept his hands in the air as if the message of protest were still there. The guard who had grabbed the sign ripped it into pieces. One of the other guards took out an extending baton from one of the many pouches in his vest and struck the protester across the face with it. With only one blow, the man was on the ground. It didn’t matter to the guards that the protester was completely motionless, his face flat on the concrete, they still took turns kicking him. When the man started convulsing on the ground, one of the men in black stopped beating him, but only so he could hold the rabble rouser still and give the other three guards an easier target to work with.
“Do you think he’s an Ed or a Joe?” the Ruler said.
No one else would know what he was referring to except Matheson, who, along with the Ruler, had developed the nicknames for the two types of dissidents back when they had written a college term paper together on the topic of public unrest. Eds were people who knew exactly what they were doing, knew the risks, and did it anyway, often sacrificing their freedom and sometimes even their lives to do so. Joes were people who stumbled into dissent, either because they said something dumb, didn’t know the effect their words or actions would have, or because they were caught up in what other people were saying and joined along. These people could be swayed into apologizing for the things they said and did and could even take the opposing viewpoint the next day, depending on which way the wind was blowing.
“Has to be an Ed,” Matheson said. “Kept his hands in the air, like the cardboard didn’t matter.”
Th
e Ruler nodded. “Poor, stupid bastard.”
There had been a time when thousands of similar posters were held up, painted on walls, written on t-shirts, by people just like the man who was now probably dead. Those people were all gone now, because they had all seen what happened to people like the man with the wrinkled shirt and stained pants and knew it could easily happen to them if they dared stand up to the Tyranny.
Matheson and the Ruler watched the scene in silence. Once the unconscious man stopped convulsing and became motionless again, the four guards wiped the sweat from their faces and patted each other on the back for a job well done. A moment later, a van came by. The guards tossed the body into the back. The protest was over.
No one had run to the protester’s defense. No one else was even within a hundred feet of the guards. The few people who had to be out in public, going from one office building to another or running errands for their boss, kept their heads down and quickened their pace, doing their best to act as if they hadn’t seen anything.
“What will you do?” Matheson asked again, not looking away from the spot in the distance where a dark puddle lay on the sidewalk, where the man’s face had been cracked open.
As Matheson watched, a man on his cell phone, too distracted to notice where he was walking, stepped in the puddle. As the man continued down the street, he left a trail of red footprints behind him. The crimson street art would remain there until the next time it rained.
The Ruler placed an index finger on either temple and pressed. The bags under his eyes continued to get bigger with each passing day. And his hair—pitch black when he had first become Ruler—was now entirely gray.
The Theta Prophecy Page 18