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“What did they do to her?”

“They spread disinformation. I was a Communist and a slut,” Megan says. “They got me fired from my job at Berkeley.”

Stone takes her hand.

“She was a hot, sexy, rebellious professor, and I was a student radical supposedly taking her class. A little old for the part, although I was a lot skinnier—and I had this cornball alias, ‘Aquarius Bob’—but she liked me anyway. They arrested her at a demonstration on phony, cooked-up charges, I signed her out of jail, and we never looked back. Both our careers were over, so what the fuck? The Bureau went ballistic. They sent guys to my old apartment in Venice, and all they found was an empty wreck. Clothes on the floor, nothing washed, nothing put back in drawers, fast food and candy wrappers—as time went by, the layers just piled up. They let it drop, ever so subtly to everyone in L.A., that I’d flipped out and gone over to the other side, when for all they knew, I could have been living on the beach in Hawaii. They totally trashed me.”

“He was a beautiful young man.” Megan is suddenly self-conscious, eyes downcast. “He was motivated by ideals, even though they were different from mine. But that’s why I fell in love with him. He was a lanky, serious guy who kind of stumbled over the rhetoric. For all his conservative outlook, there was something edgy and unsafe about Julius, more dangerous than the most radical hippies.”

“Because I was playing both sides. It’s a high. Right, Ana?”

“We were young, ready to take on the world. I didn’t know he was an agent until he showed up at jail. He looked completely different. He’d cut his hair and put on a suit. He brought me these horrible clothes! Where did you get those clothes? I looked like a school-teacher, but it got us to Canada.”

I smile sadly. “I knew this was a love story.”

But there is bitterness, too. “What did we have?” Megan asks. “Nothing but sex. I mean, literally, nothing. But at the time, it was the only thing that seemed to matter: Making love was the ultimate political act. As if two people in bed could change the world. Then it got cold and winter came and we were sick all the time, living as fugitives until the movement started to eat its own tail.”

“You wanted out.”

“Where could we go with no résumés and no work histories that matched our ages, except the abandoned family farm that nobody wanted? We pulled out the old u-pick peach orchard and planted hazelnuts. He went back to school and learned tree farming and became a pillar of the community, and by then, well, there was no chance of children, but that’s okay, because we had our rescue animals.”

“When I went home that final time,” says Stone, “and said good-bye to my parents, I wanted them to know I wasn’t taking a top secret assignment to cause them more hurt, but of course it did, because they never saw either one of their sons again, after my brother was killed. Some days I can put a good face on it. To their dying hour, they could hold my brother up as a hero. He was a hero, but I’ll always be a criminal. If Ana Grey and friends have anything to say about it.”

“I have nothing to say.”

They all were criminals. In the late seventies, Acting Director L. Patrick Grey III and two other highly ranked FBI officials were indicted for violating the constitutional rights of relatives of the Weatherman fugitives.

“I’ll tell you what’s worse,” Stone goes on. “I tried to go public. I talked to Jimmy Breslin—”

“Stop it now,” Megan says. “Enough.”

But Stone is on a hectic roll.

“He wanted proof. Where was the proof? I’ll tell you. In forty-seven drawers of files on deep-cover operatives that the Bureau destroyed. See, that was a violation of me. Of my history. My sacrifice. My rights as a human being. And hers. I knew everything they did to Megan Tewksbury, play by play. I went to my supervisor, another sidewinder, Peter Abbott, and I said, ‘This woman is entitled to free speech. She is not a national security threat, nor is she a whore. Leave her alone.