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I couldn’t go any further. This was something
that should have been said in person, but at the same time it couldn’t wait.

“I wish I was there, Kara, to talk to you.
This doesn’t seem right.”

“Link? What is it?”

“It’s about your mom. It’s the same guy.”

I heard nothing but tears and a glass
smashing. We were back in the void, back in the breach in the continuum, where
time barely moved. Hours seemed to pass, maybe more, before Kara spoke through
her sobs.

“If he’s a cop, Link, I think I know who it
is.”

“You do?”

“My dad’s fucking best man. Robert Warren. He
was OPP, went to Windsor Police… shit, not long

after mom died. My dad hasn’t heard from him
in years. He left the force several years ago. Son of a bitch. If I find him,
Link…”

“I know, but you don’t know for sure it’s him.
Stay strong, Kara. We’ll get him, all of them. Just wait for me, please. I’ll
be back at Pearson Thursday around noon.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Please, Kara.”

“I can’t promise anything. I won’t.”

The line went dead before I had a chance to
speak. She didn’t want to argue anymore, it wasn’t worth it. Her mind had been
made up for twelve years—if she ever found out, if she ever got her hands on
him, she was going to kill him.

“Is she okay?”

“No. We just have to hope she doesn’t find him
before I get back.”

My next call was to Chen with a not-so-simple
request: keep Kara safe and out of trouble.

I BARELY SLEPT THAT NIGHT, my mind spinning with the
aftereffects of the news. Any time I’d start to fall asleep I’d see Kara, gun
in hand, firing round after round into her mother’s killer. Every time I would
jerk myself awake, startling Kat in the process. She couldn’t sleep either, and
it made me realize her newfound friendliness toward Kara really was genuine.

Kasia and Link were up and ready to go by the time the sun
broke through the apartment windows, bringing with it the sounds of a city
waking up. The world was an interesting place, no matter how far you went from
home, things were pretty much the same.

Life goes on. It has and it will, we’re just along for the
ride. Sometimes we decide how long the ride will last, sometimes others decide
it for us—it seemed that rarely did the ride last until its natural end. Maybe
it was just me and my line of work that had me jaded.

It was hard to break the news to the kids, and, of course,
the news brought with it more guilt to add to my cosmic total.

“You said you could stay for a couple of days,” Link said.
Kasia seemed too upset, or too pissed off, to speak.

“I’m sorry, Link. But I got a call last night about work, we
may know who tried to burn our house down.”

His expression brightened, once again he saw my career as a
game of cops and robbers, and daddy had a lead to follow.

“You gonna get him, Daddy?”

“I hope so, Kasia. And maybe when I do I can come back and
stay a few days before we all go home.”

If I come back. The more convoluted this became the more I
worried. But if I didn’t put an end to it, could they ever go back?

The corners of Kasia’s mouth were slowly moving upward, like
someone had tied tiny helium balloons to them and they were fighting, hard, to
pull her lips into a smile.

“Can we go somewhere today?”

“Sure, Kasia. Where do you guys want to go?”

The replies came at the same time, but couldn’t have been further
apart.

“The zoo.”

“The Copernicus centre.”

Of course. There was no way we could do both, either Link or
Kasia was going to be upset again.

“We can’t do both today. One will have to wait until I get
back.”

“We can go to the zoo today, Daddy.” Link, my little
grown-up. I reached out and mussed his hair. Kasia cheered and ran upstairs to
tell Kat, who was still going through her morning preening ritual.

“Thanks, Link. I’m really proud of you. That was a very nice
thing to do for your sister.”

He blushed. “It’s okay. I can wait.”

I pulled him in and held him tight.

I felt like I was failing as a father again, putting work
before my family once more. But it wasn’t the case this time, maybe it had
started that way, maybe that’s what got us here. But now, now it was personal.

Now I was doing it for my family.

* * *

The zoo—officially the Warsaw Zoological Garden—wasn’t far
from our temporary home. It sat on nearly a hundred acres of land in downtown
Warsaw, across the
Wis
ła
(or Vistula) river that ran through the centre of the city. Kasia’s excitement
couldn’t be contained as we pulled up and found a spot to park. She’d been
babbling away in the car, telling me about all the things we would see—her
favourite was the elephant exhibition.

And it was the first one we went to,
babcia
Agnes and
dziadzio
Kris tagging along. It was a nicer home than I had, what with
the two outdoor pools and an indoor pool. Not to mention one male elephant
living with three females. Although last time I tried something even close to
that it didn’t work out very well. Still, there was a stupid sense of envy at
that elephant, maybe the source of misguided, media-driven male bravado, or
maybe the result of eons of instinct driving the urge to propagate the species.

I sided with the media aspect.

Although the weather was quite cool, the elephants still
enjoyed themselves indoors, putting on a show for their audience as they
sprayed each other with water. I watched them closely, the way they interacted,
the way they played. It reminded me of a splash pad, running through the water
and trying, or not trying, to get soaked. It seemed like the only thing that
made us different from the animals was our capacity for violence.

Our next stop was the ‘Hippopotamus House’ where, much like
the elephants, the hippos had both an indoor and outdoor pool. A large glass
wall allowed us to watch the hippos from underwater as they swam around.

“Aren’t they cute, Daddy?”

“Um… yeah, definitely,” I said. Maybe in their own way.
Their wide-mouthed grins belied a sense of calm unlike what I knew they were
capable of. I needed to stop watching so much Discovery Channel, learning
things I didn’t need to know. Like the fact hippos are one of the deadliest, if
not the deadliest, animal in Africa.

Cute. Sure, Kasia.

We decided it was time to break for lunch—I wasn’t all that
hungry but after watching animals frolicking in the water, I needed a drink. We
walked past numerous other exhibits, occasionally seeing factoids in Polish as
we walked through the zoo. Kasia and Link took turns translating what they
could and I couldn’t believe how far their Polish had come.

“It’s says there’s more than four thousand animals here,
Daddy,” Link said.

“And most of the animals died in the war,” Kasia said, a
look of sadness on her face. “Why?”

Explaining war to a child of not even six. “Well,” I
started, “a long time ago, over seventy years ago, someone not so nice decided
to try to take over Europe. His planes and zeppelins dropped bombs on the city
and lots of buildings were destroyed, and I guess lots of animals were killed.”

“What’s a zeppelin?”

“An airship, Link. A blimp.”

He nodded. Then came Kasia’s next question.

“Did people die too?”

I felt like sweat was beading on my forehead—if this was so
hard, I dreaded having ‘The Talk’ later on. “Yeah, a lot of people. But other
countries came together and fought the bad guy and won.”

“Did they kill the bad guy like you did? Ella in my class
said you shot somebody.”

My heart was pounding, my knees were shaking, my hands were
dripping with sweat. It hadn’t taken long for the press to find out that I was
the shooter, that I had killed Saunders. At least there was no way Kasia knew
about Jeffries, it was still too early to tell her about pedophiles, abductions
and rape.

I brought Kasia over to a nearby bench and sat her down on
my lap. Link had overheard enough of the conversation that he wanted to know as
well.

“Mommy said not to believe everything we heard and we’d talk
about it when we were older,” Link said. So they’d asked Kat.

“That man, the man that I shot, was a very bad man. He
killed five women, and it was the only way I could stop him.” Kasia looked like
she was vibrating, apparently I needed a heavier child to keep my legs still.
“I didn’t want to have to shoot him, but if I let him get away he would have
hurt more people.”

“Okay, daddy,” Kasia said. “Can we go see the monkeys now?”

Link chimed in next. “No, I’m hungry. Let’s eat first.”

That was it? That was the conversation I was dreading?
Hopefully the birds and the bees would be as short and sweet.

“Link wins. Lunch first, then the monkeys. Okay, Kasia?”

She looked let down, but conceded. “Fine. But I want pizza.”

“Anything you want.”

The six of us sat down and enjoyed a scattered meal of
hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza and fries before setting out once more. The
‘monkeys’ were next. They were all monkeys to Kasia, even though the ‘Ape
House’ was home to only gorillas and chimpanzees.

The gorillas had always been my favourite. They looked so
peaceful, sitting there with their huge, expressive eyes as they chewed on a
piece of foliage or just sat, like furry Buddhas, contemplating the world. The
enclosure was incredible, allowing two different views of the animals. The
first, and standard fare for zoos, was the glass looking area, a thick
partition between us and them.

But here, I found a way to almost interact with them. We
strolled along walking paths through the enclosure with nothing but water
separating us from the gorillas and chimps. They watched us curiously, showed
off occasionally, but most of the time ignored the strange visitors walking
through their home, gawking at them, talking to them and snapping pictures like
a horde of paparazzi. I wanted nothing more than to dive into the water and
swim across, clamber out and sit beside the huge male gorilla, his bulk making
me look like a toothpick.

I held back, perhaps only to not get arrested. And I knew,
that like any animal, when something invades their territory, when it poses a
danger, it must be eliminated.

* * *

We returned home with Agnes and Kris to another wonderful
dinner before setting out again, this time to the planetarium I was dying to
see. The ‘Heavens of Copernicus’ was located at the Copernicus Science Centre,
where Link had wanted to go today. It was too late now to visit the whole
centre, we’d never see everything in the time we had. Instead, we were there to
catch a show at the planetarium.

Everything seemed to be so close together in Warsaw. All of
the attractions were located close to the downtown, the Science Centre being on
this side of the
Wis
ła
and not far south of Old Town. It helped that
Kat’s parents had an apartment in a very central, and more expensive location.
There were benefits of being a doctor in any country, and Kat’s father was
enjoying those benefits. A nice place in Old Town, and affording to send his
daughter to a foreign university were the benefits he was most proud of.

Kat wasn’t kidding about
the architecture. It was beyond brilliant. An amazing display of modern
architecture—a rooftop garden, an observation deck on the planetarium and the
planetarium itself, a building designed apparently to resemble a boulder. A
nice take on the classic dome-shape.

I was given a small mp3
player when I arrived, on account of my not speaking Polish. Now I could listen
to what was being said, the information they were giving, in English without
forcing someone to translate for me. It was a nice touch, and made all the
difference.

The sound system was
incredible and with the dome-shaped screen coming all the way around us it was
like we were there, plucked out of Warsaw and plunged wherever they wanted to
take us. It wasn’t just the night sky being projected but different scenes and
images showing astronomy, nature and all the other sciences.

But it was the astronomy
that had me hooked in and unable to escape, like a minnow on a fifty pound test
line. And when the topic rolled around to Polaris, I was glued to the screen,
my head spinning in circles trying not miss a thing.

“Polaris”, it said, “also
known as the North Star, Pole Star, Lode Star or Alpha Ursae Minoris, the
brightest star in the Ursa Minor constellation, has been used for centuries as
a means of navigation for travelers in the northern hemisphere. It is easily
found by searching the skies for the ‘Little Dipper’ and looking at the last
star on the handle.

“Although not at the exact
celestial pole, the star is so close that it appears to revolve around the pole
in a circle only one and a half degrees in diameter.

“Polaris is a multiple
star located four hundred and thirty four light years from Earth. It consists
of a total of five stars with four orbiting Polaris.”

It wasn’t much new
information, just a few different names for the same star. But it renewed my
imagination, gave me something else to try. The note had been written in the
gamer/computer language of ‘Leet’, itself written 1337. It was a way of writing
using various letters, numbers and symbols to give the appearance of different
letters or numbers. Carter had used it when substituting letters for numbers in
the occurrence number he had coded and inverted. Maybe he had done the same
with the thumbdrive.

I watched the rest of the
show with interest but found my mind pulling back to the password I still
hadn’t unlocked. When the show finished we made our way home and I went
straight for the laptop and thumbdrive, ready to try again.

P014R15.

P0lar1S.

I tried various ways of
writing it, playing around with numbers and symbols, upper and lower case. I
never realized there could be so many combinations.

I also was trying
variations of different names. It was while I was trying ‘Alpha Ursae Minoris’
in different strings of letters, numbers and characters that the thumbdrive
finally unlocked. But after over an hour of trying, I had no idea what combination
I had just put in.

Shit. I had to find a way
to get rid of the password—if I didn’t and my session timed out, I’d have to
figure it out all over. But first, the files were calling to me.

I couldn’t believe the
amount of evidence Carter had, videos, photographs, statements—it was
incredible. I had no idea why he hadn’t gone to his superiors with the
information yet. But then again, like me, he didn’t know who he could trust.
And the only reason they found out about him was a perfect warrant presented to
an imperfect judge.

I opened the folder marked
surveillance and clicked on the first video. The picture was quite clear and
the image was set, focused on the doors to the warehouse at night—date stamped
four weeks before Carter died. I waited and watched, a minute passing before
lights appeared and someone walked up to the doors, opened them and disappeared
again. A large truck backed up toward the doors on an angle that luckily still
gave a view of its back end. Two people came out of the building and a third
from the driver’s side of the truck where they began unloading. It was hard to
see, the resolution not high enough to make out all the details, but I could
see them unloading cardboard boxes.