The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

fully in Ordnung, even the magazines on the table were squared off. Then the
action started.
Womm, Erika, Komm, Ursel!' a woman's voice urged, and both infants pulled
themselves up on a coffee table and tottered towards her. The camera followed
their halting, unstable steps into the woman's arms.
'Mutti, Mutti!' they both said. The detective switched the TV off.
'They're talking and walking. Ist das nicht wunderbar? Their new mother loves
them very much, Petra. Well, I thought you'd like to see that. That's all for
today.' The detective pressed a hidden button, and a guard appeared to take the
manacled prisoner back to her cell.
The cell was stark, a cubicle made of white-painted bricks. There was no outside
window, and the door was of solid steel except for a spyhole and a slot for food
trays. Petra didn't know about the TV camera that looked through what seemed to
be yet another brick near the ceiling, but was really a small plastic panel
transparent to red and infra-red light. Petra Hassler-Bock retained her
composure all the way to the cell, and until the door was slammed shut behind
her.
Then she started coming apart.
Petra's hollow eyes stared at the floor – that was painted white, also – too
wide and horrified for tears at first, contemplating the nightmare that her life
had become. It could not be real, part of her said with confidence that bordered
on madness. All she'd believed in, all she'd worked for – gone! Günther, gone.
The twins, gone. The cause, gone. Her life, gone.
The Bundes Kriminal Amt detectives only interrogated her for amusement. She knew
that much. They had never seriously probed her for information, but there was a
reason for that. She had nothing worthwhile to give them. They'd shown her
copies of the files from Stasi headquarters. Nearly everything her erstwhile
fraternal socialist brothers had had on her – far more than she had expected –
was now in West German hands. Names, addresses, phone numbers, records dating
back more than twenty years, things about herself that she'd forgotten, things
about Günther that she'd never known. All in the hands of the BKA.
It was all over. All lost.
Petra gagged and started weeping. Even Erika and Ursel, her twins, the product
of her own body, the physical evidence of her faith in the future, of her love
for Günther. Taking their first steps in the apartment of strangers. Calling
some stranger Mutti, mommy. The wife of a BKA captain – they'd told her that
much. Petra wept for half an hour, not making noise, knowing that there had to
be a microphone in the cell, this cursed white box that denied her sleep.
Everything lost.
Life – here? The first and only time she'd been in the exercise yard with other
prisoners, they'd had to pull two of them off her. She could remember their
screams as the guards had taken her for medical treatment – whore, murderess,
animal . . . To live here for forty years or more, alone, always alone, waiting
to go mad, waiting for her body to weaken and decay. For her life meant life. Of
that she was certain. There would be no pity for her. The detective had made
that clear. No pity at all. No friends. Lost and forgotten . . . except for the
hate.