N A DIFFERENT WORLD, MAKES YOUR MIND
FEEL.....STRETCHED. This weakness. It puts you in a different world,
makes your mind feel. . . stretched. Convulsed stride and a kind of
shudder. DAMN.

WHY AM I ALWAYS EXPOSED LIKE THIS? ALL THOSE YEARS, DON'T THEY MEAN
ANYTHING? Hunger and cold. MAYBE I COULD WRITE A STORY..... WOULD
THAT MAKE IT ANY BETTER? A sound to my right. The same fear again.

YOU CAN'T KNOW UNTIL YOU'VE FELT THESE THINGS. I ALWAYS THOUGHT I WAS
GOING SOMEWHERE. NOWHERE BUT THIS ROAD. Another shudder from
the cold. Chills again. DAMN IT. DAMN IT!

"Save your strength."

I'VE STILL GOT A LONG WAY TO GO.

........................................................................
...................

KGB

Images sifted through his subconscious as he slept, and his mind put a
story to them.

*

A villa just outside Berlin, in the narrow strip of West Germany
surrounded by the communist East. A beautiful dark-eyed Russian woman,
a defector, lived here beneath the shelter of trees.

She was not alone here. Other defectors. . .no, patriots. Bulgarians,
Poles and others, who loathed their totalitarian masters and the
brutality, without freedom, under which their peoples were forced to
live, and work away their lives, like ants. Former high-ranking
members of the government, military, and intelligence branches of the
Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union. KGB. Here they lived in close
communion, despite the danger, working sometimes with the West,
sometimes without it, according to their skills, to undermine the iron
grip of the communist leadership, to encourage and protect dissidents,
and to publish their work both home and abroad. As well as other goals
that were more immediately humane.

It was not a place loved by the Kremlin or the East German puppets, the
loyal KGB. Many times assassins, head hunters had been sent, either to
infiltrate or destroy the traitorous band. But so far as could be
told, under the watchful and knowing eyes of Sonya Semenov, herself a
former agent, none had yet succeeded their aim. And those who had
tried, the captured, sure of death, had not been executed, or even
turned over to the west. Instead they were sent back unharmed, with no
greater injury than the knowledge that a hated sect had shown them
mercy, and (to some) disquieting questions about their own loyalty and
courage.

For mistress Semenov, the former