The pride in family instilled by James and Annie Britt Sharp remained intense, and rightfully so, for the Sharps had become a family of great achievement and of high reputation that was zealously guarded.
The parlor of the house on Lindsey Street was dominated by an oil portrait of the family’s greatest achiever, the eldest daughter, Susie, a matriarch who never bore children or married, beaming regally in judicial robe. Susie had achieved her father’s dreams and more. Like her father, she had become involved in Democratic politics, working in campaigns for two governors and one congressman. “I was doing it largely for Daddy,” she recalled years later. “He was the politician.” She did it without expectation of reward, but in 1949, after serving as county campaign manager for Governor Kerr Scott, a dairy farmer from nearby Alamance County, she was offered a superior court judgeship. She knew the appointment would be controversial. No woman ever had held such a position in North Carolina. Knowing that she likely would face great difficulties, she was reluctant to accept. She overcame her reservations only when she spoke them to her father. “Certainly you’ll take it,” he said.
On the day she left home for her first session of court, her father offered his only advice. “Sue,” he called to her from the porch, “plow a straight furrow. And remember, you’re the boss.”
Judge Sharp gained a reputation for being fair and stern, and in 1962, Governor Terry Sanford, later to be a presidential candidate and U.S. Senator, appointed her to the North Carolina Supreme Court, the first woman in the state to hold that position. As an appeals judge, she was conservative but never shied from controversial decisions, a stickler for detail and truth, a perfectionist in her opinions who labored into the late hours almost every night on her old Royal typewriter at her stand-up desk. She might have been the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court if her friend, Senator Sam Ervin, who gained fame in the Watergate hearings, had had his way, but she was born ahead of her time and had to settle for being the first woman elected chief justice of a state supreme court in the nation’s history. That was in 1974.
Hailed as one of the finest and most astute chief justices in the state’s history, she was forced by mandatory retirement laws to step down after her seventy-second birthday in 1979. She still owned the family home in Reidsville with her sister, Louise, and retained her old bedroom there, where she occasionally spent nights, but Judge Susie, as her friends now called her, chose to remain in her apartment in Raleigh.
Although overshadowed by their eldest sister, the rest of the Sharp children had distinguished themselves as well.
Thomas, the chemist, married into a New York Social Register family, then went into defense research. He worked on the team that developed radar housing and invented new lacquers and fabrics before retiring from Sperry-Rand and moving to Florida.
Annie Hill, whose marriage had troubled the family, returned to Duke to teach student nurses during World War II. The mother of three children, she later worked with her husband, whose controversial vitamin treatments gained him international attention before his death in 1984. Annie Hill lived only a short distance from the family home, and in the spring of 1985 went there regularly to have dinner with Louise.
After three years of teaching, two of them in Reidsville, Louise had been stirred by patriotic fervor during World War II to answer a call for more nurses. She went back to school at Duke University, got a degree in nursing, and joined the Cadet Nurse Corps as a teacher. In 1947, she enlisted in the navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander before she retired in 1968 and returned home to care for her ailing mother.
Florence was a high school teacher before marrying Robert W. Newsom, who became an executive with the R. J. Reynolds and P. Lorillard tobacco companies, then started his own consulting firm in nearby Greensboro. She had returned to teaching at a business college in recent years, and had retired only a few months earlier. She was mother of two, grandmother of five.
James, the baby of the family, still called Kits, had become a surgeon, joined the U.S. Marines, and risen to the rank of captain. Now stationed at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Charleston, he, too, was nearing retirement and soon would move to Lake City, Florida, to become chief of surgery at a veterans hospital.
The sense of family pride and honor that bound and nurtured the Sharps extended beyond brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, to aunts and uncles, cousins and distant cousins, and, less than two years earlier, it had been pierced by the shock of violent, scandalous tragedy.
Annie Britt Sharp’s younger sister, Susie, married James Sharp’s first cousin, Early Garrett, who was in the tobacco business in Danville, just across the state line in Virginia. Uncle Early and Aunt Susie and their children were always welcome visitors at the Sharp house, especially at Christmas, when they would gather everybody around the piano to sing carols. Uncle Early and Aunt Susie’s daughter, Alice Marie, married her high school sweetheart, George Anderson, who became a lawyer, a civic leader in Danville, and a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. The Andersons’ marriage of thirty-two years ended in divorce on December 2, 1982, and George Anderson, fifty-six years old, began dating his young secretary, Gayle Richeson, and spoke of plans for marriage. In the summer of 1983, Anderson and his secretary slipped away from the office one afternoon, picked up her son, who was twelve, and drove into North Carolina to a cabin he owned on Lake Wildwood in Caswell County, not far from Reidsville. The three were on the boat dock, preparing for an outing on the lake, when a yellow convertible pulled up and Alice Marie Anderson got out. She opened fire with a .22 pistol, killing her former husband and wounding his secretary before putting the pistol to her own head and pulling the trigger.
Although news reports of the incident made no mention that Alice Marie was a double cousin of the Sharps, the Sharps were nonetheless horrified and embarrassed that such a thing could happen in their family.
They could not have believed that before the spring of 1985 was out, far greater carnage and scandal, indeed beyond their imaginings, would shake the family to its foundations.
13
Trepidation filled the young man, but he was determined not to show it. He did not want the older man to think him a coward, but as the black Chevrolet Blazer pulled away from the campground onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, he still wasn’t sure that he could go through with it, no matter its importance to his future. He hadn’t thought he would be so anxious. He had pictured himself cool and deliberate, like the older man, prepared for whatever might happen. But he was scared and worried about how he might react under pressure. And he knew that the older man sensed it.
“Don’t worry, everybody is nervous on his first mission,” the older man said, assuring him that even he had been a little anxious.
The young man knew that he was more than a little nervous, but he was thankful that he would not have to take part in the killing itself. His role was one of support only. And if he pulled himself together and did it well, he knew that a favorable report would be on its way to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, only two hundred miles from this campground in the Virginia mountains.
The young man considered himself a patriot. He was strongly conservative, an enemy of communism, and he had dreamed of the intrigue, adventure, and excitement of serving his country on clandestine operations as an agent of the CIA. He had a great-uncle who was involved in intelligence work in Europe. He had sought career advice from him, and his uncle had supplied him with the name of a friend who could assist him through the CIA screening process once he had completed college, but that was still more than a year away. The young man could not believe his good fortune in discovering opportunity much sooner and much closer to home. When he had spoken of his dream to the older man, a neighbor he had known all of his life but with whom he’d become close only in the past year, the older man had suggested that he might be able to help. The young man had long wondered about his neighbor’s mysterious comings and goings and the exotic weaponry he possessed, and although the older man had hinted that he was involved in important secret activities, he had not been specific until a couple of months earlier.
That was in late March. The older man had come to visit him at Lexington, a historic town in the mountains of western Virginia, where the young man was a junior at prestigious Washington and Lee University, a chemical engineering major who had found the going tough and switched to philosophy. He had taken his guest on a tour of the campus, ending at Lee Chapel, where Edward Valentine’s famous statue of a recumbent Robert E. Lee dominates the altar, and where, in the basement, Lee himself is entombed.
Afterward, they had sat under a tree on the greensward near the chapel, not far from the grave of General Lee’s horse, Traveller, and in low and cautious tones, the older man confided that he was a contract agent for the CIA—“the Company,” he called it. He spoke of years of covert activities, including several missions on which he nearly had been killed, incidents that had caused him to become very close with God. Now he was about to undertake another mission, he said, this one in Texas. Weapons, he explained, were being stolen from armories in the Midwest and shipped to insurgents in Central and South America in exchange for drugs to be sold in this country at huge profit. Not only were the guns expanding Communist domination in this hemisphere, the drugs were undermining our nation. The older man hinted at involvement by the Russian KGB. As he talked, a gray-uniformed cadet from the adjoining campus of Virginia Military Institute strolled close by with his girlfriend and the older man paused and gave them hard looks, as if they might be eavesdroppers. His mission, he went on, when the couple had passed from hearing range, would be to stop one of these despicable and traitorous weapons dealers. A “touch,” he called it. On this one, he said, he needed help. Somebody he could trust. Would the young man be interested? He would serve only in support capacity, drive, provide cover. It would be a short operation. A long weekend. And he would be paid for his time. Most important, it would be a chance for him to prove himself with the Company, a foot in the door toward a career in covert service to his country.
The young man knew that a “touch” was a killing, but he understood that killing was often necessary in defense of one’s country and moral principles. He had no qualms about that. He was impressed that the older man had such faith in him, excited at the opportunity, and without hesitation he answered yes.
When the young man went home for spring break, his neighbor presented him with a government-issue .45-caliber pistol. The young man worried that his mother or another family member might discover the weapon and question him about it, so he concealed it and carried it back to Lexington. As mid-April, time for the scheduled mission, neared, the older man returned to Lexington. He brought another .45 to replace the pistol he had given the young man earlier.
“I got it from somebody who won’t need it anymore,” he said, and the young man asked no questions. Instead, he watched the older man deftly replace all the springs in the weapon and put a new Accurizer barrel on it.
The mission, he said, had been postponed. He needed time for more surveillance.
May arrived with no further word, and on May 10, the young man’s twenty-first birthday, he went home to North Carolina. Two days later, on Mother’s Day, the older man came for him. They went to the country and practiced with their .45s and a .22 Ruger semiautomatic pistol, and the older man told him that their mission would be disguised as a camping trip and that it would be soon. That night, the young man returned to the room he rented in a private home in Lexington, and the following day the older man called to say the plan was on for Wednesday, two days away. Could he still go? A pang of fear struck the young man as he answered yes.
But on Wednesday the older man called again. Another postponement. He was having problems with his vehicle. A bearing would have to be replaced. Hang loose. He called again Thursday to say he would call on Friday. At three o’clock on Friday afternoon he called. Everything was go. He would bring the gear. Meet him at the Blue Ridge Parkway overlook on Roanoke Mountain, sixty miles southwest of Lexington, at six o’clock.
The young man went to the mountain, and there, at an overlook where hang gliders embark on daring and spectacular flights, he waited for hours, watching the sun set and the lights of Roanoke Valley twinkle on below, leaving briefly only once to drive down the mountain for a Coke and a candy bar, but the older man did not appear—no surprise, really; the older man rarely showed up when he said he would—and as ten o’clock neared, a ranger came to say the overlook was closing. The young man didn’t know what to do and returned to his room in Lexington. He was upstairs watching TV when the telephone rang downstairs and his landlady answered. The older man was calling, but the landlady thought the young man had left for the weekend and didn’t know he had returned, and before he could get downstairs, she had told the older man that he wasn’t there and hung up. The young man feared that he might have blown his opportunity, damaged the mission by not remaining in place (could that have been part of his test?). He called the older man’s mother, a family friend. If her son called would she tell him that he was back in Lexington? An hour later, the older man called back. He was at Roanoke Mountain. He would come to Lexington.
The Blazer was cluttered, as usual, with military field gear and weapons, including, the young man noticed, the Uzi machine gun in a camouflage bag that he’d seen on several occasions when they’d gone shooting in the country. The older man asked for his pistol and zipped it into a black canvas bag with another .45, his favorite. It was well after midnight when they headed for the Blue Ridge Parkway to acquire proof that they had spent this weekend camping. They stopped at Otter Creek Campground, but found it unsatisfactory and drove on to the southwest. Peaks of Otter would be better, the older man said. On the way, he mentioned a change of plan. A “situation” in North Carolina connected to the Texas mission had to be taken care of first. It required that touches be made in two cities, Winston-Salem and Charlotte, but the young man was not to worry. He would not have to put himself in danger, and he would be back in Lexington in plenty of time to pick up his take-home final exam in his medical ethics class.