“Fabian is dead,” Andrew said.
“Who?”
“One of the new engineers, a Swede.”
“The Swede? Shit, what happened?”
“He was on his bike, on the way home, and he got hit by a car. Died on impact. I haven’t told the rest of the team yet. Richard Smith is coming over in half an hour. He’s got experience handling situations like this.”
Ken went silent for a moment. It appeared he was considering the implications. “You’re the boss, Andrew, not Richard. You have to inform the team.”
“I know,” Andrew said, shaking his head. “I just need some assistance. I’m not good with this emotional stuff. Frankly, I’m afraid I’m going to say something wrong.”
Ken placed a comforting hand on Andrew’s shoulder. It seemed forced, but Andrew appreciated the gesture. “You can’t say anything wrong, Andrew. Just say what comes natural.”
Andrew nodded.
“Was there anything else you wanted to discuss with me?” Ken asked.
Andrew stared at the bottom of his coffee cup. He had to share this with someone. People weren’t built to keep secrets, secrets just kept eating away on your soul. But if he told Ken, then Ken would have to tell another person. And so the chain began. A chain that could potentially lead to the destruction of Tuna Life. No, he needed to keep his secret, needed to be strong. At least until he knew whom he could trust.
“I have to ask you a favour, Ken.”
“Anything,” Ken replied.
“I’m going to be out of the office most of this week. I have to take care of a few personal matters. Can you make sure things don’t fall apart when I’m away?”
“Sure,” Ken answered. “Are you sure you’re ok?”
“Yes,” Andrew nodded. “Everything is fine.” But everything wasn’t fine. He needed to find out where Frank Geitner had gone, and why he had asked Fabian to review Tuna Life’s source code. What was his motive? Was it Frank who had spied on Tuna Life’s users? And if so, who were those users and why had he spied on them? Those were the first questions he needed answers to.
But he needed help. Luckily Richard Smith was on his way to Tuna Life’s offices. Andrew didn’t have to mention anything about what Fabian had suspected, but he could use Richard to find out more about Frank Geitner’s background.
Regardless of what had just happened with Fabian, Andrew needed to find Frank Geitner. He couldn’t just disappear.
Nobody just disappeared.
46
Eddie Molan was seated at one end of the large oval conference table. The residual eleven members of the newly established think-tank for the Gold Coast occupied the rest of the chairs. The city’s think-tank had been one of Eddie Molan’s grandest visions for his Mayoral bid. A think-tank, representing the brightest minds the city could muster, consisting of the cultural elite and the most successful businessmen. Originally he had wanted the think-tank to consist of fifty members. But he had quickly scrapped that plan. The greatly reduced group now consisted of twelve people, a number he still thought was too high, but it needed to be at least twelve to avoid criticism of him having too much influence.
Fortunately he had been able to influence the selection committee, so that he at least had some loyal people in the group. Then at least there was a theoretical possibility they could actually make some decisions in their meetings. But the think tank hadn’t turned out the way he had envisioned it to. So far the mayor had put forward most of the proposals; ideas that had come to him in the shower or on long jogging trips along the beach. Where was people’s creativity? Didn’t anybody have visions that reached further than their own narrow interests? The group’s two real estate developers came up with proposals in every meeting. But it was always for something they would personally benefit from. The group’s cultural alibies, a professor from Bond University and a local artist, did also bring forward suggestions. But what was the point of proposing to build a museum, estimated to cost two billions, in a city that was hardly a hundred years old? What were they supposed to exhibit? Surfboards and white-scoundrel-shoes? The list went on and on. The only person who had submitted a few good ideas was Vesna Connor, the young editor from the Gold Coast Times. It seemed like she was the only one committed to making the best decisions for the city, regardless of how it would affect her own wallet. He was also pleased to learn that she hadn’t taken his advice and invested in Varsity Lakes. She was a woman of integrity.
“It’s with pleasure I now declare our third meeting opened,” the mayor started. “We have achieved quite a lot in a short amount of time. Not many believed that when we started out. Yet another committee, lots of talking and little action – those were the comments I heard from the ordinary man and woman in the street. Well, we have shown them. We have shown them that it is possible. It is possible to get things done. We have shown them that the time for grand visions is not over, visions that stretch further than the next election period. We’ve made progress with our proposal for a new casino in Tugun, a project that will create thousands of new jobs and enable the Gold Coast to compete with Macau, Sydney and Las Vegas for the wealthy Asian tourists. We are making progress in our efforts to establish the Gold Coast as an Australian Silicon Valley. With our close proximity to Asia we are a natural fit for companies wanting to launch their services in China and the rest of Asia. There is lots of talk in the news about Australia being in a unique situation. While European industry is struggling with profitability, and youth unemployment is reaching new heights, our country is steaming on full engine. Everybody around this table, here today, knows that this statement is simply not true. Australia has two economies: those who work with natural resources and those who work with everything else. High demand for iron and coal does little to improve trading conditions on the Gold Coast, except for making it more difficult to attract staff. Why work as a brick layer on the coast when you can triple your salary driving a dumper in Western Australia? The resource boom has driven the Aussie dollar so high that it is almost impossible to export anything, and has made it cheaper to go on holidays in Thailand instead of our beloved city. But do not despair, my friends. Because we are the future. The Gold Coast is the future. We can’t base ourselves on a resource-economy. We can’t live selling off our family silver. Technology is the future. And we are world class in technology.
“Today I want to discuss how we can get even better at it. How we can get more companies to consider relocating their headquarters to the Gold Coast. How we can become world class.
“And with that comment I would like to introduce Andrew Engels, CEO of the up and coming mobile app Tuna Life.”
“Thanks for the introduction, Eddie,” a confident Andrew started. “The Gold Coast. What is the Gold Coast? What do we think about when we hear The Gold Coast?” he asked.
“Beaches, sun and summer.”
“The white shoe brigade.”
“School holidays, good food and theme parks.”
The various think-tank members offered their opinions about what the Gold Coast meant to them. What they associated with the coast.
Andrew squinted. “God’s waiting room, that’s what I’ve always associated the Gold Coast with. A place people move to die.”
It was dead silent in the room when Andrew continued. “As our very informal survey has just proven – we all associate different things with the Gold Coast. My view is coloured by the fact that I worked for many years in an accounting firm. Every day I dealt with retirees, who after a long and active work life moved to the Gold Coast to play golf while they were waiting to die.” Andrew pointed at one of the real estate developers with his index finger. “Rob probably mentioned the white shoe brigade because that’s the argument he is often met with when attempting to get people from Sydney to invest here.” Rob, the real estate developer, nodded.
“What we need is a simple message we can sell to the rest of the world. We can’t be good at a hundred different things. We need to choose one thing, to become best at one thing.”
“And you want that one thing to be technology?” asked one of the hotel owners present. “Isn’t that praying for your sick mother?”
“I can agree with your argument,” Andrew replied. “But we can’t afford to get stuck in the past. Look at Europe, look at Greece and Spain. To sell the Gold Coast as a tourist destination, to sell the Gold Coast as a cheap place for holidays and umbrella-drinks is not sustainable in the long run. We have the opportunity to create something unique here on the Gold Coast. We have the opportunity to create something the world has never seen before.”
The members of the think tank all stared sceptically at Andrew. One could almost feel the tension in the room.
“I don’t only want the Gold Coast to become the new Silicon Valley – I want it to become the new Macau. I want it to become the new Dubai.”
None of the think tank members said anything. The room was dead silent. Some of them looked down at the table or checked their mobile phones discreetly. Had Andrew Engels lost it? Had he become so blinded by his own success that he had totally lost his common sense?
“How are we supposed to compete against Dubai? They have a bunch of Sheiks with large check books. What do we have? A bankrupt city council?” one of the members asked, quickly adding an apology to the mayor. It wasn’t his intention to badmouth the city council, but it was a fact that they spent more than they earned every year.
“We have the best beaches in the world. We have the opportunity to build a world class casino, a casino that could compete with the best in Macau and Las Vegas. We have access to unlimited funds if we are willing to open up for more direct investment from China, and we have some of the hottest tech start-ups on the planet. There is only one thing we lack,” Andrew said.
“What’s that?” the mayor asked.
“We don’t have any celebrities.”
“How is having celebrities going to help us?” the mayor asked.
“Reality is what you make it. If you walk around and tell people you are successful, then over time people will believe you are. What we, on the Gold Coast have, is the total opposite. We walk around whinging and complaining about how tough we’re doing it. How our beaches have taken a beating from all the storms, how the power bills have gone up and businesses have shut their doors. We complain about the high dollar and the drop in the value of our homes. Right now we are only best at one thing – complaining.”
He took a deep breath.
“We need to convince celebrities to purchase vacation homes here. We need to convince celebrities to start investing in our local businesses. We create our own reality. We create our own destiny.”
Some of the think-tank members slowly raised their gaze. There wasn’t any immediate risk the room was going to erupt into applause, but maybe Andrew was onto something?
There was no help in going around complaining.
47
There was a decent turnout at the press conference. The Chief of Police in Surfers Paradise straightened his back, before grabbing the microphone squarely with both hands. He squinted at the gathering of media, next of kin, and random citizens. He was looking for Mark Moss, the journalist responsible for this whole mess. The paper claimed that it had been a technical glitch, that one of the production guys in the Gold Coast Times’ internet edition had released an article not meant for publishing. It had been deleted thirty minutes later. But the damage was already done. It could very well be correct that the story wasn’t meant to be published. The question everyone was asking themselves, though, was why one of the Gold Coast Times’ journalists had drafted an article about a possible serial killer on the coast in the first place. Was there anything to his theories?
The Chief of Police couldn’t spot him. It was just as well. He was probably holed up in a meeting with the top management of the paper. If he hadn’t already lost his job, it wasn’t many hours away.
“We have absolutely no reason to believe there is a serial killer walking the streets of Surfers Paradise,” the Chief of Police started. “There is no basis for the allegations, which frankly seems taken out of thin air. I can also confirm that the Gold Coast Times has issued a press release where they distance themselves from the allegations. The article in question had never been approved for release. It was simply a result of a reporter with a vivid imagination.”
“But is there anything in the theories Mark Moss has put forward? That there seems to be a lot of similarities between these missing persons cases on the Gold Coast?”
“I can confirm that there are certain similarities between the cases. But that’s natural. We have a large number of missing persons on the coast, and in Queensland in general, every year. If you look for similarities you will always find some. But the reality is that all of these cases are still very much open. And I can ensure you that we do our very best to locate all missing persons. Unfortunately some of the missing persons do not want to be found, something that can make our work difficult.”
“Are you saying that all these women disappeared out of their own free will?” a reporter asked.
The Chief of Police immediately regretted his words, but he couldn’t take them back. “All I’m saying is that all the cases are still open. We have no indications that anything criminal has happened in any of the cases. That being said, we will review all these cases again, just to ensure that we haven’t missed anything.”
“So you admit that the cases haven’t been investigated well enough?”
The Chief of Police stared at the reporter with steel blue eyes. His lip curled up and his face reddened. “That’s not what I said. We have good routines on how to deal with missing persons cases, but we can always improve. That’s the reason we will review these cases again. And I hope that will help next of kin get some peace and assurance in this chaos that has ensued,” he said, before placing the microphone back at the boom. He turned around, and left the room.
Inside the Chief of Police’s office, the mayor was waiting. “We need to quash this before it spirals out of control,” the mayor said. “A serial killer on the coast? It would be catastrophic for tourism.”