TUNA LIFE (26 page)

Scott wondered whether he should run a check on how many blonde nineteen-year-olds disappeared from Moscow each year. Probably a few. He caught himself remembering his wife again. Her heart had always been too big. She had worked as a psychologist. Her clients had mostly been young kids who had been abused at some stage in their adolescence, young kids who didn’t fit in anywhere.

Scott’s wife had attempted to help them find their place in the world. To find a life.

She had witnessed so much misery through her job. Was that the reason she did what she did? Was that the reason she took her own life?

55

Andrew was sitting in one of the local coffee shops in Nimbin, moping. He hadn’t been able to locate Frank, he hadn’t been able to find a single trace of him. He had been to the Hemp Embassy and the Nimbin Museum, the two places most of the drug sales took place after the Nimbin police’s amateurish attempt to stop the trade in 2008. More than a hundred police officers, suited up in bullet proof vests, had searched through the entire main street for narcotics. It had resulted in the seizure of a paltry four kilo of cannabis, and a night in prison for eight locals. Not exactly newsworthy stuff.

And the day after, life went on as normal in Nimbin.

Andrew studied the menu. He decided to stay away from the brownies. One never knew what they could contain. He had made that mistake before. Accepted to eat a cookie Frank had offered him. That was a day he would never get back.

Andrew flipped through the information Richard had provided about Frank. Richard had done a great job. Or, one of his assistants had done a great job was probably a more accurate assessment. Richard Smith was one of those guys who had outsourced and automated large parts of his life. He utilised virtual assistants to help him with most of his daily tasks. He used to say that a team of assistants were sitting in the Philippines, just waiting for his next email. It made him look incredibly efficient though. One could ask him to acquire some information, and he would have it available the very next day.

It was the Filipinos who had figured out that Frank Geitner and Frank Voser was the same person, and that the real Frank Geitner had died many years ago. They had succeeded where Interpol and the Australian Immigration had failed.

Andrew sometimes wished it was possible to replace Tuna Life’s receptionist, Yvonne, with a virtual assistant from the Philippines. Yvonne wasn’t exactly brilliant at her job; even the simplest task seemed to take an eternity. But he didn’t have the heart to fire her. She had been Tuna Life’s first hire, when she started working at the support line. And it was Frank Geitner who had recommended her. And then there was also the fact that she had two kids to take care of.

Andrew realised it was probably one of his weaknesses: the fact that he still hadn’t fired anyone. He knew he had done some bad hires, people who maybe were good at what they did, but who didn’t really fit into the culture he was attempting to create at Tuna Life. Sooner or later he would have to get rid of them. The employees in Tuna Life were all so young that it wasn’t an option to wait for natural attrition. Except for the Swedish programmer, Fabian, of course. But Andrew couldn’t wait for more of his employees to die in convenient traffic accidents. He made a mental decision to attack the problem head-on when he got back to the office.

But for the next two days the priority was to find Frank.

Richard Smith had been smart. When he had figured out that something wasn’t right about Frank Geitner’s background he had utilised some of the technology another Y-Bator-company had come up with. The company had developed a technology for facial recognition. The technology was only average and the competition was fierce. The company would most likely not survive more than another six months, and Richard was desperately searching for a buyer before the money ran out. But for Andrew’s request the technology had been a perfect match. Richard had snapped a photo of Frank, Ken and Andrew on the day he handed them the check for a hundred grand. It was something he always did. He had a whole drawer filled with photos of teams he and Roman had funded over the years. He had located the picture, and used the facial recognition software to run a check against the internet. And incredibly enough, he had received a hit. From Interpol’s Red Notices page of all places. It had been an old picture, but the software had recognised the distinctive marks that were unique to Frank.

From there he had managed to locate Frank’s birth name and last known address. He had told the Filipinos to do the rest of the work. They had managed to get hold of a reporter who knew Frank’s background. The reporter had wondered why someone was interested in Frank Voser after all these years, but they had managed to brush her off with a cover story about their employer conducting some research for a book about cyber-crime.

A child prodigy, Andrew thought. How would it be to be a child prodigy? Andrew had struggled enough with his own dad’s expectations; expectations that he would have to get himself a good education, and a secure and respected job. He now understood that he hadn’t been living his own life; he had never been happy in his job at Avensis Accounting, he had always believed he was meant for something better. But he had never known what. Now, after having started Tuna Life, after having witnessed how easy it was to make millions of dollars on something as simple as an idea, he wasn’t in doubt anymore. This was what he was meant to do, and a criminal hacker wasn’t going to ruin his plans.

In the corner of his eye he noticed a familiar person. Andrew rose from the table, pulled his cap down in his face and put on his sunglasses.

The person walked into the Hemp Embassy.

Andrew crossed the road, and followed.

56

It was dark outside. Mark Moss looked inside the fridge. There was nothing tempting him. What he really felt like was a fat juicy burger, a Whopper Cheese from Hungry Jack’s. He had been eating too much healthy food lately. His body longed for some unhealthy fast food, something that could quench his hunger.

He was sharing a house with two girls. One of them had received some financial assistance from her parents, and bought a small brick house in Burleigh Heads. Mark rented one room, and the last bedroom was occupied by an art student. Mark got along well with both of them. The girl who owned the house was almost never home, and the art student mostly kept to herself. It was a good arrangement. Mark had lived with friends before, and that hadn’t always been so great. There was always this expectation that you had to spend time together. Now he could choose to be by himself whenever he wanted. He could simply walk into his room and shut the door, and the others would leave him alone. The only complaint he had about the cohabitation was the dinner arrangements. The art student had suggested that they could all save money by eating dinner together. Instead of them all making their own separate dinners every night, they would be allocated a week where they had to make dinner for all three. Mark had agreed a month ago. That was before he was told the art student was a vegetarian. Three days with salad for dinner had drained him of strength. He needed proteins, he needed fat, he needed sugar. His brain didn’t function properly on this vegan diet. He wrote a note to the art student, and placed it on the kitchen bench. Then he ran out to his car. It was probably best he got going before she arrived home. She was against all processed food, and Mark didn’t have any high hopes she would appreciate his choice of dinner.

Australia was the only country in the world where Burger King wasn’t called Burger King. The name had already been taken, by a small takeaway restaurant in Adelaide, when the American fast-food giant decided to expand their business to down under. They went to court, but lost, and they settled for Hungry Jack’s instead. The burgers, however, were exactly the same. Big, fat and cooked on open flame. Mark’s belly growled when he thought about it. He had been busy in his new job. He wouldn’t say he loved it, to work in production wasn’t the same as being out in the field, reporting the news, but it was a relatively simple job, and there was some interesting new technology to learn. Thus he hadn’t had much time to work on the case with the missing girls. He wasn’t supposed to, either. The editor, Vesna Connor, had been pretty clear on that. But Mark hadn’t given up. He knew something wasn’t right. In fact, he was one hundred and ten percent certain that all the missing girls had been victims of something sinister, that there was a serial killer walking the streets of the Gold Coast. And he believed he finally had made a breakthrough the previous evening. He had been sitting at home in front of his computer, making a list of what the missing girls had in common. The list had initially had simple connections; like that all of the girls had been blonde, that they all had disappeared around the same time each year, that some of them were students and that most of them worked in the nightclub or hospitality industry. But then he had remembered something Scott had mentioned. An innocent comment about how difficult it was to know if someone suffered from depression - Scott had lived with his own wife for ten years without having a clue. Marissa had been born with a genetic disposition for depression, and Kylie Jones had been depressed throughout her teens. Mark had a thought: had any of the other missing girls also been depressed?

He had made some quick phone calls to next of kin of the missing girls the following day. He hadn’t been able to get hold of them all. Some of the relatives lived abroad. For the first victim, the Dutch Heidi Voog, there was no contact information for next of kin. And others were also hard to track down. But Mark had discovered a possible pattern. All of the parents spoke about daughters with depression. The tech community wasn’t the lead he had been looking for. All the missing girls had been going to psychologists for their depression.

That was the connection.

Now he just needed to find out who they had been going to; maybe a psychologist was the killer?

He drove up to the drive-through hatch of Hungry Jack’s, and ordered a large Whopper Cheese meal. As he was waiting for the food to arrive he heard his mobile ring. It was a hidden number.

“Hi, you’re talking to Mark,” he answered.

“We need to talk,” the voice on the other end said.

“Who am I talking to?”

“Someone who wants to help you.”

“Help me with what?”

“Help you find who killed Marissa,” the voice answered.

“Do you know who killed her?”

“I have a good idea of who it might be.”

“A good idea? That’s not good enough. You need to give me something more.”

The line went silent.

“You’re on the right track. They all went to a psychologist.” The voice was back.

“How do you know that?” Mark asked.

“As I said – I’ve got a good idea of who may be responsible.”

“I need a name. What’s your name?”

“That’s not gonna happen. Not over the phone. We can meet instead.”

“I am not going to meet you unless you give me your name.”

“Call me AB. But you’re not getting a name. That’s too dangerous.”

“Ok. Where can I meet you?” Mark asked.

“Do you know where Playhouse Adult store in Burleigh Heads is?” the voice asked.

“Yes.”

Meet me there in ten minutes. Come alone,” the voice said, before the line was cut.

Mark Moss stared at his mobile. He considered what to do. Was there someone playing a prank on him? He had become somewhat of a local celebrity on the internet after his speculative article had gone viral. Was there someone wanting to play a joke on him due to the article? Make a YouTube prank on the gullible journalist? Or was this the real deal? Did the person on the phone really know something about the missing girls? Was this the break he had been waiting for? He had to take the chance. He couldn’t afford not to. And there was something special about the voice. As if he had heard it before somewhere.

He called Scott’s number and left a message. There was no one else he could call. His boss, Vesna, had specifically told him to stay off the case. He would lose his job if she knew he was still working on the story. He placed the Hungry Jack’s meal in the passenger seat and drove out on the highway.

He was too wired up to eat.

He had a contact.

Someone who knew something about Marissa and the other missing girls.

57

“What are you doing about it?” Roman Bezhrev yelled.

Richard Smith was seated in the Arabia-inspired couch next to Andrew. Andrew secretly wished they had opted for a more standard-looking board room, and not this stupid room that Ken had designed. It felt like they were sitting in the tent of an Arab Warlord, ready to receive their sentencing when Roman snapped his fingers.

“We are dependent on finding Frank before we can make changes to the code,” Andrew said, to break the mental image he had in his head.

“Why?” Roman asked.

“Because Frank is the only one who can make changes to the source code. We don’t know what’s going to happen if we go in and mess around with something our other programmers don’t fully understand. We need Frank,” Andrew said.

“We don’t have time to wait. This new competitor, Virtua-something.”

“Virtual-U,” Richard corrected.

“Virtual-U,” Roman repeated, “is taking market share from Tuna Life. It has new functions our app doesn’t.”

“It’s all under control,” Andrew said. “We have all these functions ready to go. We just have to press the button.”

“Then fucking press the button.”

Andrew sighed. “We need to wait until we have spoken to Frank. There are parts of his code we don’t fully understand, and we can’t launch these new functions before we have conferred with him. Before we have understood what we can and can’t do without risking ruining the whole program.”

“Press the fucking button!” Roman said, before rising and leaving for the door.

Richard Smith let out a sigh of relief. It was a long one, and Andrew wondered if he had been holding his breath for most of the meeting.