Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [38]
Abbott produces a surveillance photo from an environmental protest that took place on the Columbia River Gorge in the early seventies. Against a haze of wooded cliffs, a young lady with a heartrendingly unspoiled face is engaged in an angry shouting match with a fortyish white male in a suit. I can see in her righteousness the same woman who tried to stop the fight in the bar. The confrontation here is on the edge of violence. Professor Laurel Williams has literally draped herself in an American flag, looking like an avenging Statue of Liberty—and even in black and white, the senior Abbott, sporting a curly ’fro, is red in the face. Protesters surge toward the podium, fingers stretching in the peace sign. Somewhere in the crowd is our young undercover agent Dick Stone.
“Is that the esteemed congressman from Oregon?” Angelo asks.
Abbott nods. “That’s my father. Nice sideburns, Dad.” He waits for the laugh. “Thanks to Ana Grey’s outstanding work, we now know that Laurel Williams and former FBI agent Dick Stone are alive and well and living under assumed identities. When I was supervisor, Dick Stone was working undercover up in Berkeley to infiltrate the Weather Underground, a bunch of radicals who wanted to bring the Vietnam War home—literally blow up the government. Then he drops out of sight. There was speculation that Stone joined the subculture—”
“Speculation?” Angelo scoffs. “The Bureau’s always made him out to be disloyal, violent hippie scum.”
“We believed he might have been involved in bank robberies and bombings along with the Weathermen,” Abbott says. “He was trained in munitions in the Army. But how did you tie Dick Stone to Laurel Williams?” he asks, still looking at me.
“Special Agent Dick Stone was the last one to sign out the prisoner, Laurel Williams, in order to accompany her to court in San Francisco for arraignment,” I say. “Neither one showed up. At some point, he took the name Julius Emerson Phelps, who was an infant who died in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1949.”
“You and I might be the only ones old enough to remember”—Galloway shamelessly ogles Abbott for attention—“but that’s how the Weathermen went underground. They’d go to the graveyard, find babies who died the same year they were born, and apply for that baby’s birth certificate, saying it was theirs and they’d lost it. Then they could get a driver’s license and Social Security card. In those days, there was no correlation between birth and death certificates. No tracking system.
“Stone told Agent Grey that he was born in Ohio as a deliberate misdirection so that if anybody checked, they would not find Julius Emerson Phelps in that state and maybe just give up. It was another layer of deception. One more possible escape route.”
Peter Abbott nods and opens a file. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
“It’s a love story!” I announce to a dozen sets of startled eyes. “The greatest love story ever told! She’s a radical professor; he’s an undercover FBI agent. They fall in love. He busts her out of jail and they join the revolution. Now they’re old and gray, still together, still fighting for the cause.”
Peter Abbott sends me a squinty, patient smile and drinks some water. There is a moment of silence.
“We have a former agent who flipped.” Galloway waves an unlit cigar impatiently. “That’s the whole deal right there.”
He taps Stone’s rookie ID photograph, which shows a handsome, square-jawed young man wearing a white shirt and a suit with narrow lapels and a skinny tie. He has the steely, unspoiled look of a new cadet. Invincible confidence.
It stops my mind to imagine that the same hazelnut farmer who builds bombs and gets off on Blue Oyster Cult went through the Academy in Quantico, just like I did. That once upon