Chapter 11

Ann and I started our new training by getting a full history of the Organization and its objectives. Man, I was impressed with the scope of the Organization's operations. They were trying to cover 13,742 timelines, and, needless to say, they were stretched pretty thin. There was an assignment waiting for us if the business with the sector supervisor was delayed much longer. We'd find out about it later, if we picked up the job.

Meanwhile, we went on to learn hundreds of new languages, as much medical knowledge as could be done without surgical instruments or antibiotics, and a plethora of combat styles, both with and without weapons. All of this was a hell of a lot of information, so that was why it took two whole days for us to get it all. Now, we had everything that a normal field agent needed to know and were ready to be sent back into the field to places other than the Old West. There was plenty to do there, but there was a quicky that Lars wanted us to look into.

Nothing had ever been done before about saving lives. Always, the task had been to eliminate somebody who was causing trouble. In this case, Lars wanted to try a major experiment, namely, he wanted to stop John Wilkes Booth from murdering Abraham Lincoln. A computer simulation had suggested that the best time to do that was to kill Booth during the afternoon before the scheduled assassination. Ann and I were dressed as gentlemen who moved in the same social circles as Booth and placed in Washington, DC, on the morning of the event.

Our intention was to follow Booth and eliminate him "with extreme prejudice," as the CIA used to say, at any time we could find him alone and not likely to attract attention. This was not as easy as it sounded. Booth liked to surround himself with admirers who clung to every word the great man said, and that was often a quote from Shakespeare, though he did deign to use a current author if he had appeared in one of the author's plays.

As a result, we were never able to get close to Booth, but were reduced to following him around on the fringe of his entourage. This was OK at first, but it began to be a nuisance as the day wore on. And wear on it did. Booth was the most conceited bore that I had ever encountered. He figured that he knew everything that was important, and he brooked no disagreement. Thus, we saw one of his sycophants banished for accidentally disagreeing with one of the great man's casual remarks about a brand of whiskey.

We stuck with him until fairly late in the afternoon when he finally cast out all of his fans and started to get ready for his part in the evening's activities. He went by his hotel and changed into an outfit more suited to that of an assassin, or, rather, his idea of what a stage assassin should wear. This included those fancy spurs which were to be his downfall following the shooting of Lincoln.

He left the hotel and went to the livery stable where he kept the horse he planned to use for his getaway. It began to look like we had screwed up by not taking him out when he was in his hotel room, but we had not wanted to spend a long time in there cleaning up a lot of spilled blood. We planned to hit him when he was in some side alley where nobody would notice a splotch of blood, but would figure that it was just another mugging—a common event in cities of the times.

Booth rode from the livery stable to the theater and hitched his horse near the rear door that the performers commonly used when leaving after a performance. It looked like now or never, so we swooped down on Booth at he was turning away from his horse. In the interests of speed and efficiency, I stabbed him just over the left kidney with an eight-inch stiletto, commonly known as an Arkansas Frog Sticker. With my recently acquired skill, I was able to puncture his heart, so that part of the job was done. The next phase was to go through his pockets to simulate a robbery. Between Ann and me, we got that done in a hurry and were just turning away when we were seen by a theater employee who opened the door Booth was about to enter.

This was perfect! Now, the killing would be attributed to a mugging and not to any political doings. We took off running and were transported as soon as we were out of sight around a corner. We left the man who had seen us shouting for help and running after us. This was my first attempt to change history, and I was full of excitement over its success. Ann and I were on pins and needles to learn how our efforts had turned out.

Dammit, we never did find out how much difference our escapade would have made, since, on his way to the theater that night, Lincoln tripped on a carpet and fell down the stairs. He broke his neck and died instantly. Was this history compensating for our actions, or was it just plain bad luck? The really strange thing was that the scientists searched diligently, but could never find the alternate timeline where we had been successful and Lincoln had lived. Very strange, indeed.

Meanwhile, Ann and I returned to San Antonio to see what was going on with the sector supervisor. He had returned to San Antonio to settle with Bennett and Hudnut, but could not find either one. He was frantic in his efforts to locate them, but, of course, he never could. Both Bennett's house and Hudnut's ranch were deserted, and there was not a clue about where either one had gone. He attempted to cover his ass by writing a report to his superiors that Bennett and Hudnut had stolen the money and left the state. Unfortunately, that was where the investigation stalled while we waited for new developments. He had used some sort of communicator to send his report, so we were not able to trace the signal. All we could do was wait.

While we were waiting, I felt an overpowering compulsion to travel toward Ft. Worth. I couldn't tell if my target was actually in Ft. Worth, or on the road to it. Ann and I saddled up a couple of horses and set out with a pack mule to head in a northerly direction until my compulsion was satisfied. I kept a close eye on my GPS demon finding device, but I couldn't see anything but the usual scattering of flags on the screen. Oh, well, we were sure that something would turn up.

We were approximately 100 miles north of San Antonio when our idyllic ride through the Texas countryside was rudely interrupted. We had stopped at a stream to let our horses drink when we heard a terrible crash and roar about a half mile away. Naturally, we rushed to investigate immediately.

By the time we got there, the dust was settling around a major train wreck. The locomotive had run off the track and overturned (the crash we heard), followed almost immediately by the boiler exploding (the roar we heard). The locomotive explosion had shredded the cab, making sure that neither the engineer nor the fireman had survived. The express car and the baggage car were lying on their sides, and the six passenger cars were scattered about the landscape, all amazingly still on their wheels.

What really grabbed our attention were the three men standing on the side of the express car. The were all wearing bandanna masks and holding guns pointed down at the open door of the express car. This was no time to fool around. Ann and I pulled out our light machine guns (the pseudo-Winchesters) and sprayed the three bandits with bullets. All three were hit multiple times and fell dead where they stood. We rushed to the open express car door and looked in.

I had holstered my LMG (light machine gun) and was preparing to climb into the express car to investigate further when a shot rang out and I felt a thud against my body armor. I was not injured, but I was staggered back by the force of the blow, since the bullet had been fired less than five feet away. I fell on the ground on my back and had the breath knocked out of me as a result.

Ann screamed and opened up with her LMG at the head that was now poking out of the door. There may have been as many as 20 bullets hitting that head and the place where it had been before it was reduced to mush before Ann got hold of herself and stopped shooting. She later told me that she feared that I had been killed, even though she knew intellectually just how unlikely that was.