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By Root 1107 0

its distribution into what had been the Eastern Bloc, to serve American businessmen and tourists who were flooding the former communist nations. The locals also used it, both as a way to hone their English skills and to keep track of what was happening in America, more than ever a fascination to people learning how to emulate something they'd been raised to hate. In addition it was as fine an information source as had ever been available in those countries. Soon everyone was buying it, and the American management of the paper was expanding operations to broaden its readership still further.

One such regular reader was Gunther Bock. He lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, having left Germany - the eastern part - rather hurriedly some months before, after a warning tip from a former friend in the Stasi. With his wife, Petra, Bock had been a unit leader in the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and after that had been crushed by the West German police, in the Red Army Faction. Two near arrests by the Bundeskriminalamt had frightened him across the Czech border, and thence on to the DDK, where he had settled into a quiet semi-retirement. With a new identity, new papers, a regular job - he never showed up, but the employment records were completely in Ordnung - he deemed himself safe. Neither he nor Petra had reckoned with the popular revolt that had overturned the government of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but they both decided that they could survive that change in anonymity. They'd never counted on a popular riot storming into Stasi headquarters, either. That event had resulted in the destruction of literally millions of documents. Many of the documents had not been destroyed, however. Many of the rioters had been agents of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the West German intelligence agency, who'd been in the front ranks of the intruders, and known exactly which rooms to savage. Within days, people from the RAF had started disappearing. It had been hard to tell at first. The DDR telephone system was so decrepit that getting phone calls through had never been easy, and for obvious security reasons the former associates had not lived in the same areas, but when another married couple had failed to make a rendezvous for dinner, Gunther and Petra had sensed trouble. Too late. While the husband made rapid plans to leave the country, five heavily armed GSG-9 commandos had kicked down the flimsy door of the Bock apartment in East Berlin. They'd found Petra nursing one of her twin daughters, but whatever sympathy they might have felt at so touching a scene had been mitigated by the fact that Petra Bock had murdered three West German citizens, one quite brutally. Petra was now in a maximum-security prison, serving a life sentence in a country where 'life' meant that you left prison in a casket or not at all. The twin daughters were the adopted children of a Munich police captain and his barren wife. It was very odd, Gunther thought, how much that stung him. After all, he was a revolutionary. He had plotted and killed for his cause. It was absurd that he would allow himself to be enraged by the imprisonment of his wife and the loss of his children. But. But they had Petra's nose and eyes, and they'd smiled for him. They would not be taught to hate him, Gunther knew. They'd never even be told who he and Petra had been. He'd dedicated himself to something larger and grander than mere corporeal existence. He and his colleagues had made a conscious and reasoned decision to build a better and more just world for the common man, and yet - and yet he and Petra had decided, also in a reasoned and conscious way, to bring into it children who would learn their parents' ways, to be the next generation of Bocks, to eat the fruits of their parents' heroic labor. Gunther was enraged that this might not happen.

Worse still was his bewilderment. What had happened was quite impossible. Unmoglich. Unglaublich. The people, the common Volk of the DDK had risen up like revolutionaries themselves, forsaking their nearly perfect socialist state, opting instead to merge