Death By Degrees

by Harrison Drake

Chen came out and saw what I was doing. “Link, keep going, not everyone is out yet. They’re trying to defuse the bomb now.”

  “Go,” I said to him. “Get Kara and get out.”

  “No, Link.”

  I wasn’t going to lose everyone. My voice deepened to almost a growl as I turned and told him to get out. That time he listened.

  “Keep going, Link, don’t stop, okay?”

  I thought I could see a tear in his eye as he turned to leave, to try to make it through the crush of people jammed up in the doorways.

  I kept pushing on Crawford’s chest until I could feel the muscles in my chest and arms burning. With every push I hoped he would sputter some more and come back to life, ready to finally answer my questions. It was never going to happen, he was long gone.

  How long could I keep this up, how long until there was no more blood to push through his body? Or would the pressure be enough?

  It seemed like it had been hours when an officer came out of the Edicule and told me to stop. They had succeeded where Crawford had been convinced we’d fail. The bomb was defused.

  It was over.

  I stopped the CPR and leaned back. We had won, just barely, but we had won. Voices echoed throughout the domed room and in moments a hush fell over the crowd. People relaxed, they stopped pushing and shoving, some fell to the knees and began to pray, others cheered and applauded. In only a few minutes they had gone from believing they were going to die to knowing that they were saved.

  Some seemed to find solace in that fact. They uttered their prayers, hugged their families and marvelled at the gift that they had been given. In reality, they’d never lost anything, it had only been temporarily misplaced. What they had now, that sense of life and joy and happiness and purpose, had been absent long before they walked into this church. It was what we took for granted every single day, but they had found it once more. They never lost a thing.

  And yet I had lost so much.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was all over. Of course, there was still the paperwork and press conferences, interviews and everything else we needed to do before we could finally put a ‘closed’ stamp on the case file. Since he had started, Crawford had been responsible for sixty-eight deaths, not including his own. I didn’t include Kat among the dead – as far as we were all concerned she was still a missing person. Nothing was going to make me give up hope.

  The Israeli officer who had disarmed the bomb had done an incredible job. I couldn’t imagine having to do that job, everything hinging on you. And there was a lot riding on it. If the bomb had gone off, the church likely would have been destroyed and Crawford could have easily reached the death toll he was looking for, somewhere in the range of the Mark of the Beast – 666.

  It didn’t take long for the news to break worldwide, and when it did it brought Kat to the forefront. To see her face plastered on international media as the final victim and still missing drove a dagger through my heart.

  “It’s everywhere, Chen. TV, radio, internet, everyone is asking where she is. It’s almost more talked about than Crawford’s death and what we prevented here.”

  “The lead investigator’s wife is a victim, that’s all they see. It’s drama, Link. More drama for the news, you know how it is.”

  Eddie must have heard the conversation. His fingers moved in the flurry I’d grown accustomed to and a new page took over the projection screen. It was a picture of Kat, her profile photo from teaching, on a Facebook page dedicated to her.

  “I wasn’t sure about showing this to you, Lincoln. But people are posting condolences and everything here. They’re trying to get the word out to help you bring her home. It’s been up only for an hour now and there are already nearly a hundred thousand likes. They’re pulling for you.”

  I was speechless. With that many eyes opened around the world, we’d bring her home soon enough. Someone would see something, someone would call us eventually. But all of this was based on her still being alive.

  I never heard anyone come in, didn’t know there was someone behind me until they announced themselves. When I turned around I saw a man standing there in full uniform, medals draped from his chest. He held his hat in his left arm and outstretched his right hand toward me.

  “Asaf Shapir,” he said. “I am the Commissioner of the Israeli police.” The Israeli officers in the room that hadn’t noticed his arrival did now. They stood at attention and showed their respect to the head of the police department.

  “Thank you,” he said as he shook my hand. I nodded. “You and your team have done unbelievable work here. You’ve save countless lives and one of the most important heritage sites in the country. Words cannot express our gratitude.”

  I nodded again, unsure of what to say.

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t meet with you sooner, but it wasn’t easy to arrange for everyone we had working on this. There were a lot of strings to pull.”

  “I’m sure. Thank you. We wouldn’t have been able to do all of this ourselves.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry to hear about your wife, Detective. I hope that you find her safe and sound. In the meantime, you probably want to be getting back to France. I’ve been told you have children there.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re staying with Detective Chen’s wife.”

  “You’re needed there then, more than you are here. I pulled one more string and got you a flight out of the country and back to Lyon. If you’ll come with me, you’ll leave as soon as we get you to the base.”

  “The base?”

  “I made one last request of the military. You’ll be home tonight.”

  I looked at my watch. It was nearing six in the evening. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I chose not to argue it. They were bringing me home, that was all that mattered.

  “Once your reports are complete, send them through the INTERPOL office to us.”

  “Thank you.”

  He led me outside to a waiting vehicle and within minutes we were en route to the air force base. I took out my phone and dialed Julie’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Daddy, are you coming home now? Julie said you stopped him.”

  “Yeah, Link, we did. I’ll be home very soon.”

  “Did you find mommy?”

  “Not yet, but we’re still looking.”

  He started to cry. “I saw her on the news, daddy. Her picture was there and they were saying that she might be dead.”

  “She’s not, Link. We’re going to find her.”

  “We want you home. Kasia has been crying all day, and I’m trying to be strong because I don’t want her to be scared, but I can’t.”

  He was breaking down. I could hear his anguish, picture the tears. I needed to get home.

  “You’re doing great, buddy. You keep being the big man, alright? I’m going to be there tonight, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, but I knew he wasn’t. “I love you.”

  “Love you too, bud. See you soon.”

  I hung up the phone and dried my eyes.

  The Commissioner seemed like he wanted to say something, but the right words never seemed right enough. We rode in silence until we arrived at the air force base and I was taken out to the runway to meet my chariot.

  An hour later we were well on our way back to France, flying at high altitude somewhere over the Mediterranean.

  “I’m still very impressed,” said the pilot midway through the flight. “Almost everyone passes out their first time.”

  It had been close, I wasn’t even sure how I’d managed to hold on. Sheer force of will, I guess. The last thing I’d expected to see waiting on the runway was an F-15 fighter jet. It was a training model which allowed for me to have a seat behind the pilot. They fitted me with a fligh
t suit and before I knew it, we were off.

  The pilot had gone a little easier on me, avoiding the fifty-thousand feet per minute climb. We reached altitude at nearly sixty-five thousand feet after a couple of minutes and began cruising at over twenty-five-hundred kilometres per hour. Never in a million years.

  It was hard to reference how fast we were traveling, but something in me knew it was ridiculous. It had to be. We were only in the air for about an hour when we touched down in Lyon, the French having been kind enough to accept a foreign fighter jet at a civilian airport.

  There was a vehicle waiting to take me home and even with the light traffic in Lyon at the time, it seemed like the longest part of the trip. The anticipation of getting home and holding the kids once more was almost too much to handle; the disappointment I felt at coming home alone was.

  It didn’t matter. The moment I opened the door and walked in they charged toward me like I had been gone for months. I knelt down and they wrapped their little arms around my neck and squeezed tightly. As we held onto each other, things began to come back together. Bit by bit, the pieces of my world were falling back into place even if they did so around a gaping hole in the middle of the puzzle. The hole would get smaller, but it would never close all the way. Somewhere out there, the last piece of the puzzle was waiting for me to find it.

  “I’m home, and I’m not going anywhere else,” I said.

  They squeezed tighter.

  “I’m sorry, daddy,” Kasia said.

  “For what?”

  “For not talking to you yesterday and today.”

  “It’s okay, honey, you were upset. It’s fine.”

  I turned my head to look at her face, the red and puffy eyes as she wept into my shoulder. Link was crying too, but I could see relief in his eyes. He’d done a good job as man of the house, a burden no one his age should have ever been required to bear.

  “You did good, Link,” I said. “Thanks for taking care of your sister.”

  He looked up at me and smiled through the tears.

  We were by no means complete, but we were together once more.

  Epilogue

  We sat around the Christmas tree in Kat’s parents’ apartment in Warsaw, the kids filled to the brim with a mix of excitement and sadness. A large portrait of Kat sat on the table beside the Christmas tree. None of us had given up hope, and we refused to believe that she was gone.

  It had been several months with no signs of her whatsoever. The search continued with every day that passed, but each day seemed to bring us no closer to having her home. When we returned from Israel there was a press conference regarding Kat. We begged for anyone with any information to come forward. I put the majority of the money I’d received from the insurance payout on the house down as a reward with INTERPOL and other organizations contributing as well. Even with a million dollars for information leading to her location, we had nothing.

  Kat’s parents were suffering from the loss of their only daughter, their failing health had worsened and I worried that they wouldn’t last long enough for us to find her and bring her home to them. They seemed to have lost everything when she went missing. Nothing seemed to bring them the joy they once had. Even with the grandkids around, they just weren’t the same.

  I had put every ounce of energy I had into looking for Kat, and the kids had suffered for it. Chen and Julie eventually went back home, Eddie went back to London, and Najat went to meet Dr. Heinlen in Africa before returning to London and moving in with Eddie. Kara refused to leave. She quit the OPP and took a permanent position with INTERPOL. I still received the occasional call from her; she would let me know that she was still on the case, still looking for Kat. She’d run things by me, ask me questions, hope that I would see something differently.

  I never did. No matter how hard I tried, it was always the same – just another dead end. After two months with no answers and seeing the pain it was causing to the kids to have one parent missing and another one absent by his own choosing, I handed in the gun and the badge and moved the kids to Warsaw.

  We lived in a small apartment within walking distance of Agnes and Kris and they had taken on an active role in keeping the kids happy and sane in the face of everything going on.

  It wasn’t a happy life, but it worked. And with every day that passed it got a little bit better, a little bit easier.

  Some things would never be forgotten and every night, after the kids had gone to sleep, I unlocked the door to the small storage room and closed myself inside. Maps, photos, newspaper clippings and notes covered every inch of the wall. Some nights I worked, trying to find something I missed. Other nights I put my phone on the makeshift desk and just stared, my eyes locked on the Polaroid of Kat blindfolded and restrained, waiting for a phone call.

  About the Author

  Harrison Drake is the pseudonym of a Canadian writer and career police officer who has chosen anonymity in order to protect a safe, secure and quiet lifestyle for his family.

  The author is hard at work on numerous other writing projects in numerous other genres. If he can’t be found at home, playing with his children or sitting in his lonely writer’s garret, he’ll be outside, gazing up at the night sky and searching for answers.

  Website: HarrisonDrake.com

  Twitter: @HDrakeTheWriter