Текст книги "Driver Chronicles: Book 1 - The Passenger"

Автор книги: Niall Roche

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Chapter 14

The background noise in the diner was always present but not loud enough to distract Jason from his train of thought, or to distract Heller from his story. It was just the usual mumbled conversations, with the odd burst of laughter thrown in. Diners were like a tiny, compressed version of the outside world. It’s like seeing every aspect of society crammed into one big room, all fighting to make their voices heard, grabbing their few seconds in the spotlight of life.

Jason found himself whispering across the table in surprise, "So now you're telling me the vice president of the United States was in on the deal, too? That seems a bit far-fetched Heller. People would have talked. Something would have leaked out!" This was followed up by a nervous glance over his shoulder to see if anyone had heard what the old man had just said.

Heller still obviously didn’t care who was listening to their conversation. "Well, the way it went was that JFK was a dead man either way, but if there was any civil unrest because people figured out what really happened, or one of the sources blabbed, then we needed someone ready to impose martial law overnight. There was the best part of an armed regiment in the air over Texas that day, just waiting for the word. That's the value of a puppet like Johnson, he was willing to do whatever it took to get rid of Kennedy, and that included declaring martial law if he needed to. We couldn’t have asked for better.”

Every time the old man presented Jason with yet another fact about the Kennedy murder, he felt like he sank one inch lower into a swamp he'd never quite be able to climb out of. This was the kind of muck that was going to stick to him forever. You never felt really clean after hearing information like this. He felt sick to his stomach.

"Didn't it ever cross your mind that you'd get caught? Or even that you might get caught?" Jason said.

"To be honest, actually organizing an operation like this involves a huge amount of risk, and we all knew that. There's every chance that it will fall apart, or some fool will go opening his mouth afterward. We had contingency plans for Oswald and Ruby, but you can never be 100% certain. We were lucky that Americans like neat little answers, tied up in a bow, so once Kennedy was in the ground, no one came asking any questions,” Heller explained.

“Most people never even asked how Oswald, a guy who spent his entire life avoiding work, had suddenly managed to get a job in the book depository just a few weeks before Kennedy was killed. Even that one thread could have caught us out. But it didn't, because the reality is that no one wants to hear the real truth about how the world works, Jason.”

Here he sat, being told possibly the greatest story in modern history, and he knew no one would ever believe a word of it. He just wished he had some way of recording what was going on. My phone, he realized and started to casually search his jeans pocket for some way to turn on the recorder on his new smartphone. He was careful not to even glance down at what his hands were up to, maintaining friendly eye contact with Heller all the time.

Stopping mid-sentence, Heller stared at him and said, "Don't do that, Jason. Don't try to record this. That wouldn't be very nice. Take your hand out of your pocket and put it back on the table, please. I might be dying, but I'm not stupid."

Chapter 15

Jason sheepishly put his hand back on the table. He knew that Heller could see the few drops of sweat that had sprung up like tiny lakes on his forehead. There was a lot of menace still left in this old man, even if he was at death's door. In a split second, he'd reduced him from a grown man to a frightened child, and he knew it. Here was a man who could mess with your head without even touching you. He shuddered at the thought of what Bill Heller might have been capable of as a younger man.

"You said, 'No one wants to hear the real truth about how the world works', what did you mean by that?" Jason asked.

"It's true. In fact, we were banking on that simple fact. Once we had rolled out the lame 'lone gunman' theory after Kennedy got hit, we could see that a lot of people knew it was total BS. Or at least they did when they took a good long look at the facts. But we also knew that they weren't willing to even consider anything else. Deep down in their hearts, people know that Kennedy was murdered. They can feel it. They know they were lied to.”

Heller paused.

"There's a small mountain of facts that don't add up, including everything from several police officers reporting seeing and hearing multiple gunshots, and then you had James Tague, the bystander who was hit by a stray bullet fragment. We even faked autopsy photographs and that famous picture of Oswald holding a rifle and a newspaper? Completely fake. They weren't even good fakes, but they bought us the time we needed. The Zapruder film clearly shows Kennedy being shot in the throat from the front, then in the back, and then in the head from somewhere to the left and in front of him. The 'Magic Bullet' theory is more complete crap. Any modern investigation would pull the case apart in about 2 minutes, but that won't ever happen," Heller explained.

Heller paused to slurp coffee before continuing. "The Zapruder film clearly showed Kennedy clutching at his throat when he was hit by the first round. He then slumped forward after being hit by a second bullet, and finally the fatal shot came from another angle again. This didn't even come close to explaining how Governor Connolly was shot several times, or the fact that numerous bystanders were also hit by ricochets and bullet fragments. Everything that day pointed to well over a dozen rounds being fired at the presidential motorcade."

Jason felt his head spinning again. Heller was right, people knew that Kennedy had been murdered but somehow wanted to accept the sugar pill of crazed gunman with Communist links killing their president instead. The masses might be outraged, but they definitely weren't ready to accept the real truth of what happened that day in 1963. Blaming communists had been an easy way to cover up a lot of the shit the U.S. government had gotten up to in the past, and it worked just as well for covering up the Kennedy hit.

"Look at it this way, Jason. The files on the Kennedy assassination should have been made public decades ago, but we still have to wait until at least 2017 for the CIA to release all of the 90,000+ pages of documentation they have. Why so long? Why do people have to wait over 50 years to find out what really happened to Kennedy? What does the CIA really know about the whole mess?"

Jason scratched his chin, and shrugged his shoulders, showing he had no clue why that might be the case. Listening to this guy was almost hypnotic, but then he imagined that natural charisma in Heller's game probably opened a lot of doors for him. The people behind those doors would obviously have had a lot of reason to regret ever allowing him to walk into a room with them.

Heller chuckled just enough for Jason to pay a little bit of extra attention to him. Somehow, this crazy old man had found something funny in his story.

"The men who know what happened are a dying breed, Jason. Literally. It won't be too long now for the last of us to be gone. We know the real secrets. We know where the bodies are buried. We know what happened to all the witnesses. Dead men don't talk, and by the time 2017 is rung in, the last of the Kennedy men will be dead men. Case closed."

"So what part did you play on the day, Heller? Where were you standing? What was your job?" Jason asked. He was in this deep now so he might as well get all the gory details, too, although he kinda hated himself for even wanting to know more about this. It was all a bit...unsettling.

"I took the first shot. Not as a manner of honor or priority, it was just how it went. Just before Kennedy turned into Dealey, we had most of his Secret Service detachment hang back, so he drove into that plaza completely naked; there was nothing or no one to protect him. I didn't need to take another shot, although I did, because the split second I saw Kennedy grab at his throat, I knew I'd hit the bull’s-eye. After that, it was up to the rest of the shooters to finish the job, which they obviously did. It's almost funny, looking back at how much evidence there was for multiple shooters, but how no one wanted to acknowledge it. It was blatantly obvious that Oswald could never have shot Kennedy in the throat. Not unless he was floating in front of the presidential motorcade, which he obviously wasn't."

That much at least made sense to Jason. Experts had been trying to prove for years that Oswald had not only been one of the best snipers in the world, but that he could also cause bullets to defy the laws of physics. That kind of thing would look cool in a movie, but it didn’t add up in real life.

Heller sighed. "Almost every one of the doctors at Parkland Hospital said that Kennedy's throat wound was a bullet entry wound – a small, neat little hole. Once Kennedy had been moved to Bethesda Naval Hospital, the 'entry wound' had become a tracheotomy scar instead, although if it was, then it looked like a blind man had performed it with a screwdriver. Except for the military cover up that day, we'd have been exposed almost immediately. They made sure all the evidence was hidden before anyone ever had a chance to examine it. Any civilian doctor, given enough time to examine Kennedy properly, would have figured out we were lying our asses off and that he'd been shot from at least 3 different locations.”

"So to answer your question about whether or not we were afraid we'd get caught, Jason...well...we knew it was possible, but we were also pretty sure that the panic we caused that day would cover our tracks for months at least. In the end, our tracks were covered forever. The nation was in mourning, and once all that had calmed down, there was still that little war in Vietnam to worry about and good ole LBJ was more than happy to escalate that conflict to a whole new level. America was distracted, and that was just fine with us.”

Jason just sat there, listening intently. Anyone else listening to this old guy talking would have thought that it was just a crazy old man telling tall tales. Another conspiracy nut boring people to tears in some diner. Jason knew different though. He now knew Heller was telling the truth.  He also had to remind himself Heller was also a murderer. He shivered slightly.

Chapter 16

Just as his story was taking on a life of its own, Heller paused for a few seconds and then started to get up from the table. “Excuse me. I need to use the restroom, I'm afraid my bladder isn't quite what it used to be. I won’t be long.”

Jason found himself half standing up to help the old man out of the booth. He sat back down instead, reminding himself that there was still plenty of steel left inside this old dude – he didn’t really need any help. Only for the fact the cancer was eating this guy alive, Jason figured he'd have lived to be well over 100. Heller was tough as old boots. Jason could feel it.

Bill Heller strolled slowly to the rest room, opening it to find it empty. It was a pretty typical rest room, with some urinals and two crappers behind him for the guys who couldn't wait to get home. It was pretty typical example of a restroom.

Going to the toilet at his age was an adventure all on its own though. His prostate was the size of a small balloon, and, of course, the fact that he was basically a walking tumor didn’t help either. This sickness hadn’t really crept up on him so much as suddenly arrived just over 2 years ago. Still though, the universe has to balance the books, doesn’t it? Young Armstrong had been right about that. Probably had more insight into the whole thing than he’d ever understand, too.

After several moments of struggling, he’d finally managed to empty his bladder, then zipped up, and moved to the faucet to wash his hands. He glanced in the mirror and tried to recognize the face looking back at him. The eyes were still his but the face belonged to someone else – that haggard, bag of skin attached to his skull just never looked right. His mind was as sharp as it ever had been, but his body was finally failing under the weight of years of abuse he’d inflicted on it, and the evils he’d inflicted on others.

He closed his eyes while he was washing his hands, and, in that split second, he saw Kennedy grab his throat and lurch forward again. He heard the screams of confusion as the other shots rang out. It was as real now as it had been 50 years ago. He had done the right thing, hadn’t he? He’d help to save millions by making sure Kennedy died. It seemed that the older he got, the more he had to justify to himself what he'd done that day. It was almost as if time made things worse rather than easing the pain of it all. He deserved the pain though. No doubt in his mind about that.

He was still wandering through this memory when someone grabbed his throat from behind – a powerful hand, too. For anyone else, this would have caused absolute panic and a choke reflex, but not for Bill Heller. No, sir. Plus, this guy wasn't the best hitman he'd ever come across either – he was only choking him with one hand. "Amateur" was the one thought that popped into Heller's mind.

A voice whispered in his ear. “You thought you were going to get away, old man. You thought you were going to choose when you kicked the bucket. No way. This is a message from the 'Council'."

The choking grip tightened more as Heller felt another hand moving to push him forward into the wall in front of him. Whoever this guy was, he obviously assumed that Heller was just going to be choked to death surrounded by the stink of piss, stale cologne, and dampness. Bill Heller decides when Bill Heller dies – nobody else. This was the last mistake this rookie was ever going to make.

The guy squeezing Heller’s throat never got to see that the reason his eyes were closed wasn’t because of panic. It was because he’d entered that Zen place inside his head, the place he went to just before he did something terrible.  Killing someone while you’re angry makes you sloppy. You make mistakes, you get caught and then you’re getting yourself killed at the end of a needle, a rope, or a bullet.  Serenity was the best place to commit a murder from. Bill Heller had learned that a long time ago.

The big goon behind Heller was still squeezing for all he was worth, working his second hand into the equation now. What happened next was so sudden that anyone watching from the outside could have mistaken it for a scene from some martial arts movie. The victim wasn’t the victim now.

Heller turned to his left slightly and ducked his head downwards, breaking the attacker's choke hold in an instant. He heard the “Ughh…” of surprise escaping from the rookie killer’s mouth as he did this. It was one of the last noises this man was ever going to make.

As he continued moving to the left, he had a split second to draw a scalpel from his pocket, gripping it firmly but lightly in his right hand. Calm. Cool. No force. He continued a downward pivot to his left and then crouching slightly, he quickly sliced into the inner thigh of his assailant with his right hand.

Unless you were inside Bill Heller’s head, or an ER surgeon, you would have had no idea what had just happened. The scalpel was so sharp that the big guy choking him wasn’t going to figure it out for a while yet either. He’d just cut clean through the femoral artery with a barely audible 'snick' as the blade cut through fabric and flesh. The quietest whisper was all it took to seal this man’s fate.

Heller took two steps back to examine his handiwork. That effort of escaping had winded him badly, he could feel just how much energy he's used up in taking out just one thug. In the good ole days, he could have taken this guy out without breaking a sweat. Now, the effort had almost killed him.

Whoever had been choking him stumbled backwards into a cubicle, his hand gripping his groin near his thigh. The nerves in his leg were obviously flaring with pain now in an attempt to tell him he had a mortal injury and he had to take care of it.

Heller stood watching him calmly. The big goon had that look of surprise people have on their face just before a car crash, but he was slowly turning a very white color, too. No matter how hard clamped his hand down on his thigh, blood was gushing from the wound. When your femoral gets cut that cleanly, you don't have much time, and Heller could see this guy was already going into shock. He was getting ready to go asleep for a good, long…eternity.

Realizing there was no point in waiting around to be caught mid-murder by some random guy wandering into the restroom, Heller knew he had to finish what he’d just started. He took two quick steps forward and crushed his attacker’s windpipe with the heel of his palm. It doesn't take much effort to crush a human throat once you knew how, and the old man knew exactly what he was doing.

The gasping, bleeding mess in front of him slumped backward onto the toilet. Whoever he was, he was dead now. With a gentle click, Heller pulled the door closed.

He checked himself for blood spatters, found none, and went back to washing his hands and musing on the past. He found himself smiling into the mirror now, and for just a split second, he felt sure that he saw the face of a younger man smiling back at him.

“So the Council aren’t quite done with me yet? That’s good to know,” he muttered to himself.

Once he was done washing the blood off his hands, Heller checked the door one more time, stretched himself fully upright, cracked his neck, and exhaled deeply, closing his eyes as he did. For some people, murder made them weak with fear and sick to their stomach. Right now, though, Bill Heller felt more alive than he had in many years. He felt great actually.

A few moments later, he shuffled out of the restroom and into the diner, walking slowly back to the table as Jason watched him intently, but pretended not to.

With a slight groan, he sat himself down in the booth across from Jason, smiled and then continued with eating his pie. Heller knew it was always a good idea that people believed you were far feebler than you actually were – a few grunts and wheezes was usually more than enough to convince them of that.

Chapter 17

"They even found other weapons in the Book Depository, did you know that? They found at least one other handgun there, but no one ever asked what it was for. It actually belonged to Oswald, because his original programming included a 'suicide' instruction, where he'd fire several shots, drop the rifle, and then blow his own brains out,” Heller demonstrated the motion of a guy offing himself with a pistol. “Unfortunately, the 'Ultra' program was still quite ummm...immature...back then, so Oswald's programming didn't run as expected. Ruby took care of that though, so we didn't care how Oswald died, just as long as it happened."

"Bill...you said earlier that Kennedy had to be killed so that millions of people could live, or something like that?" Jason asked. He’d heard the remorse in the old man’s voice earlier, and it was the one bit of the story he hadn’t explained just yet. This was the reason they killed Kennedy after all, so he wanted to know more.

Heller paused and looked straight ahead of him for several moments, and then lowered his gaze to focus on the surface of the table they were sitting at. His breathing had slowed, and that sickening wheezing coming from inside Heller seemed to ease off just a little bit. To anyone passing by, it probably looked like some old guy was just having a "silver" moment, but Jason knew it was deeper than that – this was a man mentally wrestling with a demon that had been haunting him for years.

"How do you really tell what's right from wrong?" Heller asked but leaving the question hang in the air for someone else to answer. "How can a seemingly good deed go so badly wrong?"

Jason growled through his teeth, "Jesus Christ, Heller, are you suggesting that executing Kennedy was a good deed?"

"It seemed to be at the time, Jason. We thought we were saving the world from a far worse fate. We sacrificed one man to save tens of millions." Heller replied.

"I wasn't sure before, Heller, but I'm almost completely sure now – you're a raving madman. How the hell can you justify doing what you did?" Jason said.

Heller paused again and gave him that long, cool stare. It was enough to bring any outburst to a sudden halt. It was a mental slap in the face to calm him down.

"Are you familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jason? The act that made Kennedy a hero in the eyes of the entire world."

Jason wasn’t a history expert but knew enough to reply. "Yes, I am. The Russians tried to set up a missile base on Cuba, meaning that Florida and the southern states would become a radioactive wasteland and we wouldn't have known a damned thing about it until it was all over. We’d have had barely a few minutes warning before those missiles hit the United States. Right?”

Heller smiled, "Well, yes, that's the long and short of it, but as much as Kennedy saved the world from a nuclear holocaust that day, he exposed something far more terrible – the complete and total lack of a weapons gap between the USSR and the United States. You see, for years, the U.S. Central Command had believed that the Soviet Union had thousands of highly accurate ICBMs, capable of literally wiping out North America and her European allies in one massive attack.”

Heller paused for a few seconds, cigarette in hand, his thumbnail pressed against his teeth in thought.

“The reality was totally different though, Jason. In fact, the USSR was so far behind us in weapons development, we could have taken them out in a long weekend of fighting. It might have meant the U.S. suffering a few million casualties, but the Soviet Union would have ceased to exist. Even the few survivors there would have had to leave, because that whole place would be a radioactive hell for about 1,000 years, give or take.”

"I still don't get why that meant Kennedy had to be killed, though? You said earlier he was against the war. He didn’t want a nuclear war either, surely?" Jason asked.

"Patience, Jason…patience. I’m getting there. Once the older guys in the Department of Defense realized that we could easily win a nuclear war against Russia, plans were put in place to make that happen – we were going to launch a first strike, using our subs to take out their main launch sites in a massive attack. Once their missile sites were gone, we could do a clean sweep across the Soviet Union with our ICBMs, picking whatever targets we wanted. Our bombers could then nuke any straggler facilities or cities. We figured on taking several million casualties ourselves, but that was more than acceptable. The bonus here was that China and Vietnam would walk away from any potential conflict with the United States because once they saw what we did to the Russians, no one would dare oppose us. There would have been a new global empire, and all of it run by the United States.”

"Kennedy figured out what you were doing, didn't he?" Jason said. "Or he just suspected?"

Heller was smiling as he replied, "Well spotted, Jason, and, yes, he did. It started, like most things in life, as an unsettling feeling in his gut. Kennedy had always known something or someone in his government was rotten, and growing more rotten every day. Soon enough, those loyal to Kennedy had told him that a first strike would be launched with or without his approval,” Heller shook his head sadly. “At first, Kennedy tried reasoning with the war mongers through back channels, doing everything he could to stop the coming genocide, but no one was listening. He knew how powerful the military industrial complex was, and if they really wanted a war, that they'd get one regardless. In the end, Kennedy decided he had no option left open to him except to tell the American people what was really happening in their government, and hoped they would overthrow the hidden military dictatorship in the United States and stop a global nuclear war from starting."

When Dwight D. Eisenhower retired from the office of President of the United States, he gave a final speech on January 17th, 1961. In this speech, he hinted at the fact that the United States was coming under the control of something he called "the military industrial complex". This same military industrial complex was apparently responsible for organizing the Kennedy assassination. He knew that democracy in the United States was slowly being eroded. Even then, the cracks were appearing.

"Jesus! Kennedy was going to start a second American Revolution?" Jason asked.

Heller nodded quickly. "Yes, that was what he had in mind, Jason. He was going to expose the U.S. military for the corrupt institution it had become, expose it for its existing war crimes, and then let the American people decide what to do next. For all the might of the U.S. Army, those in power knew that tens of millions of angry, armed Americans were a threat to them, and that they'd be lucky to face a firing squad if they were ever exposed. This was the fallout from 'Paperclip', Jason. This was the price of doing business with the devil himself.”

Something about what Heller said there sounded familiar to Jason for some reason. "Paperclip??"

Heller swallowed a mouthful of coffee, drew heavily on his cigarette, and exhaled. This was obviously going to take some explaining.