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."