When Vince Oskaunas arrives at one of Edmonton's more decrepit cafes for lunch with his father, Andrius, he has no idea that it is to be their very last. Andrius declares such by explaining how Lithuania has finally reclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union and how, therefore, the time has come for him to return home. This confounds Vince, of course, but does not surprise him. Indeed, because his father had never appeared settled or content in Canada, Vince has always suspected that the enigmatic old man would disappear one day.
Neither is Vince surprised when he receives, just twelve days later, a middle-night telephone call that delivers the catastrophic news of his father's admittance into a Lithuanian hospital. Andrius had been showing signs of illness before he climbed aboard the aeroplane and so Vince was quite sure that tragedy would call. What he did not expect was that the old man would survive it or that such would require him to immediately launch a rescue... or that this mission of mercy would lead him deep into love, to family, to the gangsters within eastern Europe's blacker markets, to the "Rutskoi Rebellion" in Moscow and to the gruesome truth about the "war crimes" which had brought about his father's exile to Canada after World War II...
