CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
On Saturday afternoon, Doc had been playing golf in Atlanta with the manager of his Birmingham office. The manager happened to mention that a friend of his in Birmingham had lost a twenty-year-old son a couple of weeks ago. Shot to death in the parking lot of a bar. By a sniper. Said his friend was a prominent lawyer and wondered if Doc knew him. Harrison Fleming. Doc lied and told him he didn’t know the man.
Doc, of course, knew Fleming, a member of the team, a man he hadn’t seen since he left Vietnam. He thought it too big a coincidence that two members of Team Charlie had lost sons to snipers in the space of a couple of months. He needed to talk to Fleming, see if any of the other team members were in danger.
Doc was concerned that somehow the past was coming back to exact vengeance. He didn’t know who the perpetrators were or why they would kill the team members’ children rather than the members themselves. But the CIA has a long memory, and the teams had been run by young men. Their friends would now be in the upper echelons of the agency and maybe they’d decided to seek revenge. Take care of the team members who’d killed their buddies. Maybe the children were just the first casualties.
Before the team had been split up and sent home, the men had agreed not to seek each other out except in a dire emergency. In that case, they had a code phrase that would immediately alert the members: Opal is on the move.
Doc called Fleming at home on Saturday evening. When the phone was answered, he heard party noises, soft music, the hum of conversation, distant laughter. “Flem, this is Doc. Opal is on the move. Go to a pay phone and call this number.” The number was assigned to a disposable cell phone Desmond had bought months earlier.
Ten minutes later it rang. “Doc, you okay?”
“I’m fine, Flem. I heard about your boy. I’m sorry. My son was killed by a sniper on a beach in Florida a couple of months ago.”
“Geez, I’m sorry, man.”
“Thanks. I don’t think their deaths are a coincidence. I’m not sure what’s going down, but it’s probably connected to the teams. Can you get your family to safety? Tonight? To a place nobody would think to look?”
“Yes. There’re all at my house for my other son’s birthday. I can have them gone in an hour. My son-in-law’s family has a home in Colorado. Lots of security. They can go there.”
“Good. Get them moving, by car preferably. Airline tickets are too easy to follow-up on. Can you borrow a car from somebody?”
Fleming knew not to waste time asking questions. They weren’t needed. The directions would come. “Sure. My next door neighbor.”
“I want you to drive to the Chattanooga Airport. Park the car in the long-term lot, and walk across to the general aviation area. You’ll see a Cessna 172 parked on the ramp nearest the parking lot. A man will be standing by the plane wearing a red T-shirt with a Sloppy Joe’s Bar logo and a ball cap with the Tampa Bay Rays logo. His name is Tom Telson. He’ll fly you to the Charlie Brown Airport in Atlanta and put you in a hotel near the airport. He’ll use a credit card with the name of a company I own but nobody knows about. Don’t give out your real name. Don’t use your credit card. Don’t call anybody. Don’t tell even your family where you are. I’ll be in touch.”
It was getting late, close to ten, but Doc had one more call to make. Detective J. D. Duncan.