In War Times (53 page)

“I’m not even going to ask how you know about this conspiracy,” said Sam.

“You’re learning. Actually, I don’t think any one person knows everything. It’s like any intelligence operation—self-contained cells.”

“But why wouldn’t Hadntz know this?” asked Sam.

“There’s a great deal of darkness and confusion about this nexus,” said Wink. “The models show a lot of constantly shifting timelines leading in and out of it.”

“Maybe Hadntz does know,” said Bette. “Maybe she’s been juggling a number of different probabilities. It’s been very difficult to have this information and tools—the HD4, the HD 10, the game board, this plane—at my disposal and continue to believe that it’s best not to use it. But that strategy has to be discarded. At some point a balance tips. At some point you have to use what you’ve got, show the enemy your hand. Despite all of my—
our
denial—we’re part of the tipping.”

“What can
we
do?” asked Sam.

“The forces against us are huge. A lot of weight behind them. The problem for Kennedy was that he was actually changing things. He was a terrible threat to those in our own country with the agenda of world domination. A real wild card. When he began his presidency, he didn’t have the confidence he needed. But he was a courageous man. Which was his undoing—he was going to try and go forward no matter who threatened him. Think of all of the things he wanted to do.”

“Things I don’t know about?” said Sam.

“Probably. One, he was actively working with Khrushchev toward nuclear disarmament and peace. Two, he blamed the CIA for the Bay of Pigs, fired Dulles, and said he was going to blow the agency into a thousand pieces. That’s huge. The CIA knew he had the power to do it, and that he would. Three, he was going to remove our advisers from Vietnam—in fact, the papers for him to sign that would have started the process were on his desk when he was murdered.

“But, four, if the U.S.
didn’t
escalate the conflict that Kennedy was planning to pull out of, LBJ’s oil cronies would have lost a shitload of money, and to top it all off he was planning to dump LBJ in ’sixty-four. LBJ faced a possible prison sentence because of his buddy Bobby Baker, who was being investigated by the Senate Rules Committee. Five, Kennedy was going to change the Federal Reserve System. Basically, all these things added up to huge, ambitious, fundamental social change. Shifts in the power structure.”

Wink said, “Got any Dramamine? I’m a little queasy.”

“I’m feeling sick myself, but I’m not sure Dramamine would help. All kinds of molecular imbalances are occurring right now; our sense of time, much like our sense of balance, is controlled by many biological processes.”

“So where
are
we going?” asked Sam. “What are we going to do? When are we going to get to Jill? How do you know this will work?”

“I don’t. The only thing I’m sure of is that Jill will be on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository around noon. But before and after—I don’t know. I have a general plan, but the variables are still being summed by our vehicle. The fuse, whatever those actions might be, will not be lit until we are very, very close to the target. My concern, though, is not history, and, really, not even whether or not Kennedy lives or dies. It’s just Jill. We need to get her out. Hadntz couldn’t get me there, to the tipping point, so she lured Jill instead, knowing that we would have to follow.”

“Do you really think she’d do that?” asked Sam. Bette and Wink looked at him and said “Yes!” in unison.

“Hadntz has a whole different view of everything,” said Bette. “I’m not even sure that she’s human any more. She may have evolved into a conscious fusion of the organic and the quantum. She could just be some kind of virus, trying to infect all of time, all of memory, all of the organisms that have ever existed or that ever will exist. I’ve lain awake at night trying to figure out what, exactly, she is, what she might have become. Whatever she is, she’s banking on the fact that we’re pretty competent.”

“Maybe you are,” said Sam.

“Dance, you are the most competent person I’ve ever known.” She spoke quietly, with intense confidence. Then she became more brisk.

“Both of you are familiar with the publicized assassination theory.”

Wink said, “Didn’t happen for me, but I’ve reviewed the documents, boss.”

“Good. Jill will head for the Book Depository and try to thwart Oswald somehow. I haven’t a clue what her plan might be. But obviously, he
is
a dangerous man, and there are agents in place protecting his actions to make damned sure he can’t wriggle out of his role as patsy once he realizes that he’s supposed to take the fall. And then, as you know, before he can tell anyone anything—that he never really defected, never really left the CIA—Jack Ruby will kill him.”

“Whose agents are at the Book Depository?” asked Sam.

“Ours, in heavy quote marks. The ones who have maintained their own secret government, their own power, their own priorities and goals no matter who is elected, starting with Wild Bill Donovan and getting more Byzantine with every passing year.

“Okay. The real shooters are in
front
of Kennedy. The back of his head was blown off because a bullet entered from the front. As a backup, a man with an umbrella dart gun that my good friend Prouty—you’ve never heard of him and probably never will—approved for manufacture will send a dart into Kennedy’s neck in case the shooters miss. All of that forensic evidence mysteriously vanished, including Kennedy’s brain.

“There will be two men on the sixth floor, not Oswald. I still haven’t found out why they’re there. Somebody placed a bullet on Kennedy’s stretcher in the hospital hall with striation marks matching Oswald’s gun. Maybe they just had to make sure that gun was fired. Evidence was suppressed or vanished, witnesses mysteriously died. And so, the mission was accomplished, except for these nagging loose ends that the recalcitrant public seizes on from time to time. But a lot of the papers and evidence are not going to be released for a long, long time. Ample time for loss and obfuscation and for people just not caring anymore.”

“I’m getting a headache,” said Sam.

“I think we may black out at some point. I’ve been fighting it. There might be something like the sound barrier—maybe a time barrier—we’re pushing these waves, or these particles, closer and closer together and then we’ll break through.”

Sam looked back. “Wink is already out. Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“The music.” The sounds had changed to an actual pattern, beautiful, precise, yet open. Tones traveled across one another, creating resonances that manifested around him like pure being, invading every cell, every atom of his being, and
changed
him…

Bette smiled at him. “Certainly not as complex as the music you hear, Dance.”

It was indeed magnificently improvised, with thrilling turns and twists. But then, it sounded as if it were actually two pieces of music, so cleverly superimposed that one moved into another, the way a movie might segue into a scene that gave new meaning to what had come before. The rhythm picked up, in both parts, then the new part left the old behind and the music opened up, no longer bounded by the previously implied rules of scale and tone and time, and embraced Sam in a deep, cellular caress. Vision no longer signified anything he found meaningful, until he saw an airfield below.

At first he had to force the words out, then speech came normally. “Are we going to Love Field? Are we cleared to land?”

Bette looked at him. “Good. You’re back. No, that’s Wallace Field, a dirt strip. I could have landed at Love. I’ve got this string of numbers that just opens the world to me. Access. Thus it has ever been, at least since 1940. And,” she said grimly, “if we are very, very lucky, thus it will ever be. But I don’t want to use my clearance—that would surely alert someone. As far as they know, I’m still asleep.”

Then the plane dropped precipitously. Her face grim, Bette fought with it, brought it back up, banked and seemed to cut right through those forces, catch them and use them. She laughed, and her laugh was one of sheer exhilaration. “It’s a damned fine feeling to cheat death,” she said.

She touched down in a quick zip, taxied off the strip, and stopped the plane next to a trailer, the only building in sight. A man under a green-striped awning in a lawn chair waved.

Sam roused Wink and helped him jump down from the hatch. The temperature was pleasant, and the Texas sky was a brilliant blue. They walked toward the trailer as the old man hoisted himself out of his chair.

He was bent and skinny, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a stained white T-shirt. He gave Bette a short salute with his left hand; his right held a bottle of beer. His face was shadowed by a cowboy hat; only his grizzled beard was clearly visible. He spat on the ground. “Got your instructions, darlin’. Everything’s copasetic.”

“Thanks, Leonard. Keep an eye on my plane and
don’t touch it
!”

He grinned. “’Course not. Your car’s over there.”

“Everything in it?”

“Yup.”

A black Rambler station wagon was parked next to a pickup truck. Bette opened the back and pulled out what looked like a large leather handbag with a shoulder strap. She set it on the hood of the car and opened it, and Sam saw that it more closely resembled a briefcase. A breeze ruffled Wink’s hair, but Bette’s stood firm, fortified by hair spray. “A Walther for each of you. Cartridges. Silencers. Holsters. There’s a jacket in the backseat for each of you.”

Sam hefted the heavy, unfamiliar gun. “Is this necessary?”

She just looked at him, then set a plastic bag she’d brought from the plane into the open briefcase.

“Are those toys?” asked Wink.

Bette opened the bag. “They look like they’re made of plastic, don’t they? Let’s see…here’s an astronaut—a
female
astronaut, you’ll note. Half are female. All ethnicities—look at the face on this one, the epicanthic fold. All kinds of Africans are represented…you’re sure to find one that looks like you, no matter who you are. Um, parts of the Mars colony, a space ship…” They fell from her hand, a wealth of toys in crackling cellophane, designed for children to covet. “You have to buy a lot of cereal to get the whole set. That should sell the folks in Battle Creek. I’m thinking about the comics in Bazooka bubble gum too. I don’t know how I’ll get it to kids in other countries yet…”

“What are you talking about?” Sam noticed that she had a map of Michigan folded beneath them. Battle Creek, where many cereal manufacturers were located, was in Michigan.

“Vectors. And in case you want to know, I got these toys from the attic.” She put them in the briefcase.

Wink said, “Is that a Colt in there? How come you get that one?”

“Bette—” said Sam.

“Check your watches. It’s ten-fourteen right now. The murder is scheduled for noon or thereabouts.”

She got out a map and closed the bag. She spread out the map on the hood of the car. “Hold those edges down for me, please.” She pointed to a spot on the map. “I’m going to try to get as close as I can to the Book Depository. Now, here’s the plan.”

“Bette, I think we should stick together,” Sam said again as they entered the outskirts of Dallas. Now that he was seeing more people, he understood Bette’s getup—women really had looked this way in 1963. And it hadn’t been that long ago.

“That would be nice.” She drove carefully, stopping at every stop sign and yellow light. “Unfortunately, that’s just not possible. We have two goals here. Three, really: extract Jill safely, thwart the assassination, and get back safely.”

“Get back where?” Sam asked. “Won’t everything be different?”

“Not necessarily,” said Wink. “Although it’s possible. But time is much more elastic and nonlinear than it seems to us. It seems completely counterintuitive, but that’s just because of the way our minds work. Our brains adjust. Time…adjusts.”

“Like your body heals after a tumor is removed,” said Bette. “We’re removing a tumor. Or—adding a kidney?” She sighed. “It’s damned hard to think of models. Okay. I think I turn here…lots of people now. I’m going to park on this corner. We’re two blocks from the Book Depository.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m still not sure,” she said. She looked uncharacteristically uncertain.

“Okay,” said Wink, brisk and assured. “According to you, there are two assassination positions. If you deal with the umbrella man, I can get the guys behind the picket fence up on that hill.”

“That makes sense,” said Bette. “What do you think, Sam?”

“I think that all of us should get Jill, and the hell with Kennedy.”

“I think that having four of us there would really cut down on our chances of getting out, of getting away. We have to run a major disruption operation, distract them from Jill. Wink’s plan does that.

“The motorcade approached the Book Depository from the south and should have been in Oswald’s sights for an entire block. If he was going to shoot Kennedy, he would have shot then, not after the car had turned, when he’d have a much worse shot. Sure, if one of us could fire a few shots at the motorcade as it approaches the Depository, they’d be alerted and that would probably be enough to thwart the umbrella guy and the shooters. But there are several flaws.”

“Such as?”

“Well, like I said, we’d probably never make it out of the building.”

“Oswald did.”

“That was because he didn’t
do
anything. He was just supposed to be seen there, and he was, buying a Coke from a machine right at the moment that Kennedy was shot, on his way out of the building. He was
supposed
to get away. Those were his orders. No, I think that Wink’s first plan is the best. Except that, Wink, you take the umbrella man and I’ll take the guys behind the fence.”

“Why?” asked Wink.

“Because they’re going to be hyper-alert, but maybe they won’t feel all that threatened if a woman in a suit walks by, looking for a better place to see Kennedy. They’ll probably just tell me to get the hell out of there. Wink, you’ve studied the photographs, right? You know where to find the guy with the umbrella?”