TUNA LIFE (27 page)

“You know we don’t have time to wait,” Richard said. “In this industry you are easily forgotten. Our customers have no loyalty.”

“But we have a better product.”

“It doesn’t help, Andrew. As soon as media starts writing about something new, or actually, as soon as the innovators start talking about something new, our decline will start. Look at Apple. Cool six months ago. Now, after Steve died, it is only me and grandmothers who buy their phones,” he said, and pulled out his iPhone. He placed it next to Andrew’s Samsung. It looked tiny in comparison. “And that’s in the hardware world. As soon as Virtual-U goes past us on the download list, we will be on a downward spiral. We need to update Tuna Life, we need to update it now.”

Andrew sighed heavily. Virtual-U was a new competitor from the US, from Silicon Valley. It wasn’t that they hadn’t had competitors before. Ever since the first version of the Tuna Life app, new competitors had been popping up around the world. Most of them were based in New York and Silicon Valley, and had backing from VC firms with pockets lined with cash. Until now, none of them had been able to compete with Tuna Life’s technology though. Virtual-U was a different kinda beast. It had an almost identical user-interface, and had now beat Tuna Life to the market with a range of new functions. The similarities had been so great that Tuna Life had sued them for breaching copyrights laws. But a lawsuit could take months, if not years, and it wouldn’t stop Virtual-U from hurting their day-to-day business. The other, and much bigger problem, was what the lawsuit could do to Tuna Life’s image: As soon as they started to sue their competitors, they would risk alienating their customers. Lawsuits were how the dinosaurs of the tech industry, the likes of Microsoft and Apple, impeded competition. Was Tuna Life turning into one of those companies? A company that fought its battles in court instead of in the market place? A dinosaur?

“Andrew! You need to get out here straight away.” One of the Tuna Life engineers was standing in the doorway, with a stressed expression on his face.

“What is it?” Andrew asked. “We’re in a meeting here.”

“Virtual-U just bumped us off the list. We’re not in the top ten list on iTunes anymore.”

Andrew immediately understood the implications. Humans were simple creatures; most of them only downloaded the popular apps. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Tuna Life was among the top apps on Google.Play and iTunes, then people downloaded it by default. If the app was further down on the list, it was a whole different ball game. Then it was a fight for attention, a fight to not fade away into obscurity. The problem was magnified by the fact that most people only needed one app to do what Tuna Life did. It wasn’t necessary to have four different apps to try on clothes. It was a winner-takes-all market. And that winner had been Tuna life. Until now.

Andrew and Richard were on their feet in less than seconds. With rapid steps they arrived at the engineer’s workstation. He showed them the latest overview on iTunes.

“Release the update,” Andrew said.

“But we still don’t understand all the code. Wasn’t Frank coming back to show us how it worked?” the engineer asked.

“We can’t wait any longer. We have to keep up the momentum. Release the update.”

“I’ll prepare the press release,” Richard said, as he ran in the direction of Andrew’s fishbowl office.

The room erupted into action. This was what many of the engineers had been waiting for. It had been a while since Tuna Life last released an update. At last something was happening.

Andrew cradled his head in his hands, as he walked back to his office. He had this immense headache, and he just didn’t seem to be able to get rid of it.

In the corner of his eye he could see Ken quietly put on his hoodie, before leaving the office.

58

Andrew was sitting in his fishbowl office, staring at the computer screen in front of him. He was feeling that he was gradually losing control over the company. He didn’t have time to develop long-term strategies, to step away from the day-to-day chores and look at the big picture, to look
at
the business instead of
on
the business.

The days were consumed putting out fires. There was always some sort of crisis going on. Always something that had to be fixed.

What he should have been doing was to take the management team away for a weekend. Fly them somewhere exotic where they could sit down and hash out plans and strategies for the coming years, without all these daily distractions. Instead it felt like they were running the business from hour to hour. They panicked every time a new competitor made its presence in the market, and they were always on the back foot, never on the front foot.

Roman wanted to raise even more money from external investors, to enable them to buy any competitors that became too troublesome. But such a strategy wouldn’t work in the long run. One couldn’t buy oneself out of all problems. “Just look at how Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and Google operates,” Roman had said. “It’s not a question about who has the best product, it’s a question about who’s got the biggest muscles.” Andrew had given the statement a lot of thought. Big companies used their power to get what they wanted. If a small start-up refused to sell to Facebook, Facebook simply launched a competing service the following week. Yahoo had bought a string of popular apps, just to shut them down a few months after the acquisition. The official statement was that they paid for talent, not technology. But it was probably also a nice side-effect that new creative companies were killed off before they got a chance to grow big enough to become a threat.

Every single day was a fight – a fight for popularity, a fight for relevance.

The problem was that Andrew knew that a weekend away with the management team wouldn’t help. Richard, Ken, Andrew and Roman. None of them was visionaries. They could identify a good opportunity when they saw one. But they weren’t the type to come up with the idea in the first place.

And Frank Geitner, the creative genius who had created Tuna Life, he had vanished from the face of the Earth. If Andrew had ever made one bad decision, it would have to be the day he agreed to let Frank go. Without Frank Tuna Life had turned into a boring company. Richard Smith was continually implementing more bureaucracy and new processes. It wasn’t just that the employees disliked the professionalising of the company. It also affected Tuna Life’s users.

The employees had lost some of their enthusiasm. In the early days the employees had worked long into the night, without pay even, when some problem had to be fixed or some deadline was approaching. These days there was a line out of the office at five.

Andrew and Richard had attempted to get the enthusiasm back by organising weekly brain- and hacknights, twenty-four-hour all-nighters with the goal of fixing bugs and coming up with new creative ideas. But it didn’t seem to work. One couldn’t force creativity, it appeared. Creativity arose when people had fun. Andrew knew. Andrew knew because that was how it had been in the very beginning, the beginning when Tuna Life was still in its inception. Andrew had never felt smarter than those precious months. Ideas would come to him when he least expected it. When he now sat staring at a computer screen, attempting to squeeze an idea out of his stressed out brain, he knew the battle was lost. He had what authors called writer‘s block. The entire company had an idea-blockage. And Andrew knew that the only thing that could help them was to get Frank back.

Frank Geitner was an enigma. Richard had discovered that he had lied about his identity when he immigrated to Australia. He was a criminal, a fugitive on the run from the US government. He had hacked several countries’ intelligence agencies during the late 1980s, the US included. No one had ever figured out what his motive had been. Why hack the computer systems of the FBI and the CIA when there was no financial benefit? Why take the risk?

It didn’t seem like money mattered to Frank Geitner either. He had lost shares worth almost a hundred million when Roman forced him out of Tuna Life. Frank’s response: To shrug his shoulders and walk out the door. To vanish without a trace.

Frank Geitner was an exceptionally smart man. There had to be a plan behind his reaction, or rather a plan behind his lack of reaction. And Andrew had to find out what that was before it was too late. If Frank was of the vindictive kind, something Andrew strongly suspected he was, then he could become very dangerous for Tuna Life. He could become very dangerous for Andrew’s newfound wealth.

Andrew collected his car keys and took the elevator down to the garage.

He had to return to Nimbin.

He had to find Frank Geitner.

59

It was two am when Scott Davis rolled over to check his mobile. He was soaked in sweat. His nightmares had returned with full force. The blue light from the mobile screen came alight, and Scott started looking for the news app. He noticed, however, that he had a few unanswered calls and a couple of text messages. He quickly checked the text messages, which were all from his boss, Vesna Connor. It simply said that Mark Moss was in the hospital, and that Scott should make his way over immediately. The situation was critical. She had sent five messages.

Scott got dressed, and jumped into his car. On the way to Southport Hospital he turned on the hands-free and keyed in to check his mobile answering machine. There were four messages. Two from an insurance salesman who simply wouldn’t stop calling him, one from Vesna, who told him to get his butt to the hospital, and one from Mark Moss. Scott had to replay it three times. Mark had been contacted by a person who claimed to have information about Marissa Soo’s death. Mark asked if Scott had an opportunity to meet him outside Playhouse in Burleigh at eight o’clock. Scott swore. The phone had been on silent when he charged it. He hadn’t heard any of the calls. Why had Mark gone alone to a meeting with an unknown source? He wasn’t the type to do something stupid like that. Had he expected Scott to be there, be there to have his back? Was that the reason he was now in the hospital? Had something happened at that meeting?

Scott swore again. Why had he turned the phone on silent? He never did that. He turned on the hands-free and replayed the message for the fourth time. “Hi Scott, Mark here…Eh, I was wondering if you could do me favour. I just received a phone call. Someone who knows something about Marissa’s death. Not sure if he’s a phony or not, but I’m thinking of checking it out. I’m meeting him outside Playhouse in Burleigh in ten minutes. Would be nice to have you there. Give me a call as soon as you get the message.”

Several of Scott’s colleagues had already gathered at the hospital. Mark’s parents lived in Melbourne, so they wouldn’t arrive until the morning. Vesna had booked them on the first flight available. Vesna said it was uncertain whether Mark would survive the night, before hurriedly leading Scott into a side room. She closed the door, and suddenly she looked a lot older than her age. The wrinkle-free face gone, the perfectly composed editor suddenly looked very old.

“Was Mark still working the case with the missing women?” she asked.

Scott shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you have any idea who could have done this?” she asked.

Scott shrugged. “Mark was working crime. He was writing about a lot of dangerous guys. Bikies, con-men. All the baddies of the Gold Coast. You don’t make a lot of friends doing that. I should know,” he smiled a sad smile.

Vesna put a hand on his shoulder. It felt awkward, put-on. “Tell me, do you think this is related to the story he was working on?”

Scott shook his head. “It may be related to his job. But not to this serial killer bullshit. He had moved on from that.”

“Thank God,” Vesna said. “Everybody in the office is convinced that this has something to do with the case. That Mark was onto something, that he was starting to get too close, and that this serial killer attacked him.”

Scott smiled. “The real world is too boring. People like mysteries, people like conspiracy theories.”

Vesna Connor nodded. It was as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Mark had probably just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Accidents happened.

“Do we know what happened?” Scott asked.

“We don’t know much. The police think it’s just a mugging gone bad. Apparently there have been a couple of them down in Burleigh lately.”

Scott nodded. But he knew Mark hadn’t been the victim of a mugging. Someone had attempted to murder him. Scott had no intentions of revealing this information to his boss though. She was too busy maintaining the façade; portraying the Gold Coast as a success story. The real reason Mark was in the hospital didn’t fit into her story. And if Scott was stupid enough to inform her that Mark and he had still been working the missing-girls case, then the paper would finally have the reason to fire him they had been waiting for.

Scott knew what he had to do. He wasn’t sure if he would speak to him, but there was no other way. He had to try.

For Mark’s sake.

After having spent an hour at the hospital, Scott Davis left. When he arrived home he set his alarm clock for six am.

He wanted to speak to his brother before the day started.

60

She was staring at the ceiling. How long had she been there? She wasn’t sure. It could be days, it could be weeks. She didn’t even know whether it was night or day. She was hungry, she was thirsty, so incredibly thirsty.

She attempted to get up on her feet, but her legs buckled underneath her. She was exhausted.

She was sitting in the corner of a room. The room she had been held captive in since he had shown his true colours, his dark side. She had never seen it coming.

He had been so generous, showered her with compliments. He had been so different from all her previous boyfriends, all her previous lovers. They had been so childish; he had been so mature, so classy. She hadn’t cared about the age difference. And now she was so angry with herself – for not noticing all the small warning signs.