"Are you telling me that there was an actual coup? That the Kennedy assassination was a secret military takeover?" Jason said.

"Somewhere out there, there's always someone who wants to make the world as messed up as their head is, Jason. They don't know how to be happy, so their only goal is to make everyone as unhappy as they are right at that point in time. They're the kind of people I wound up working for in the end. Kennedy had to go for the war in Vietnam to be kept going, and for the Communists to be defeated the way the group I worked for wanted them to be."

Heller paused. “It’s also worth remembering that some of the biggest companies in the United States were making tens of billions of dollars from the Vietnam War – the United States lost over 10,000 aircraft in that war. Each of those had to be replaced, and someone was making a lot of money from that. Big business drives big war as much as any political idea, you’d do well to remember that.”

Jason knew that, back in the 50s and 60s, the whole Western world was living in fear of Communism and the looming threat of a Soviet Bear armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Of course, placing nuclear missiles within spitting distance of Florida was a dumb move, no matter what way you look at it, but Kennedy had called Khruschev's bluff on that one. And the world? Well, the world was saved from becoming a gigantic, radioactive fireball for a couple of hours, and then a frozen wasteland for the next 20 to 30 years. Convincing people that Communists were bad people was easy. The masses always preferred to have an enemy they could easily identify, and if they weren’t American, that made it even easier.

"We found a willing partner-in-crime in Lyndon Baines Johnson, too. Good ole LBJ had been embarrassed by Kennedy once too often, and had been quietly muttering about revenge for years. In private, he called the Kennedys 'the Irish Mafia', but tried to keep that one under his hat. Except when he lost his temper, and LBJ did that a whole heap,” Heller explained through a small cloud of smoke. “For a guy who looked like he said his prayers and drank warm milk before bed, he had an evil temper on him, and once he got going, anyone willing to listen would hear just how much he hated the entire Kennedy family. We didn't have to convince LBJ to work with us. We didn't have to bribe him or force him, he'd have done it for free! He was sick of being controlled by the Kennedys, so whoever wanted them gone got a gold star of approval from him."

Trying to process this much information at once can be too much for most people, and Jason found his mind spinning trying to keep up. There'd always been some questions about what happened to Kennedy, but no one ever had any real answers. The conspiracy nuts blamed everyone they could think of from the CIA, to the mafia, to a secret military coup, but there was no consistency to their answers to these questions, and opinions and theories were changed often as underwear. LBJ had never really come into the equation, from what he could remember. Then again, it wouldn't have been much of a conspiracy if the President-elect was fingered in the murder of the man he'd just replaced.

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.