He had started to get sloppy, to make mistakes. He’d noticed, at work, that he wasn’t always as alert and as concentrated as he used to be. Maybe it was age?
But it was too late to do anything about now.
He closed the boot, and got into the driver’s seat. There was a hardware store in Burleigh Heads. He needed to pick up a new spade. He couldn’t remember where he had put the old one, but it was time to get a new one anyway. The old one had done its use.
After having stopped to pick up the new spade, and a couple of other things from the hardware store, Scott continued south. He owned a small holiday home in Byron. It had been in the family for generations, and Scott had inherited it when his mum died. It was his refuge when life got difficult. It was deserted – not a neighbour for miles in each direction. Nobody accidentally popping by, knocking on the door asking to borrow a cup of sugar. No one who bothered him.
That’s what he liked most about the place – that no one bothered him.
He was planning to move there when he finally retired. He parked in front of the house and exited the car. He never looked forward to this. Even though it almost had become a routine, it was always hard. So many feelings were brought to the surface, so many supressed feelings. It was like taking the lid off a steam cooker.
He grabbed hold of the black garbage bag with one hand and threw it over his shoulder. With the spade in his free hand he started on the walk that had become a tradition over the last five years. With heavy steps he walked down to the fence cornering off the property. He listened to the birds, observed the flowers where they baked in the sun glare. But nothing seemed to calm him down.
He stopped.
Right in front of him a row of trees were lined up.
They looked like they had been standing there for years, although he knew that the last one had only been planted the previous year. Scott dropped the black garbage bag down onto the ground. It made a low thump when landing. He grabbed the spade with both hands, and started digging. He wouldn’t have to dig deep. A shallow grave would be sufficient.
He threw the spade away, and pulled the garbage bag closer to the hole in the ground.
The stench teased his nostrils.
He pulled out the tree he had purchased from Bunnings the previous day, and manoeuvred it into the shallow hole.
One tree for every year he had been alone.
Five trees.
That was how long ago he had lost Sashi, his beautiful wife Sashi.
Sashi meant moon in Indian, and that was what she had always been for Scott. She had been his sun and his moon. He just couldn’t understand why she had taken her own life. He had thought their life together was good. Why hadn’t she at least written a farewell letter, a suicide note? Explained why she did what she did? Instead she had just left him, left him without any explanation, so that he would have to live the rest of his life in uncertainty, the uncertainty whether he had done something wrong, the uncertainty whether she hadn’t really loved him.
He had been so angry at her. So angry for what she had done.
The anger was still there, as an all-embracing shadow he always carried with him. He had just become better at hiding it. He patted the dirt hard around the base of the tree, and kissed it as the smell of the fertilizer slowly dispersed into the wind.
He reminded himself to air out the car later.
“I love you Sashi, my dearest. I will always love you.”
51
The sun shone through the front windshield of Andrew’s recently acquired Tesla S. The car had the steering wheel on the left side, as he had imported it directly from California to avoid waiting until 2014 and the expected Australian launch. Even in the blasé Main Beach, where there wasn’t exactly a lack of grey-haired men, driving low cars and eating high steaks, people’s heads turned when Andrew came driving. Ferrari was Bogan, but an electric car that looked like a sports car – that was something new. It was cool.
It wasn’t very practical though. As Tesla wasn’t planning to launch in Australia for another year, there wasn’t any network of super-chargers as there were in the US and other markets. But the car was good for Tuna Life’s image. Tuna Life was something new and innovative. Of course the high-flying CEO of the coolest company in the Southern Hemisphere should be driving the coolest car you could buy. He had even paid a small fortune to get TUNALIFE on a personalised licence plate. Andrew stared at the battery gauge at the dashboard. It had been flashing red for the last ten minutes. It couldn’t be correct. The battery had been full this morning. How could he have used up all the electricity in half an hour? He had called Tesla’s customer service and followed all their advice, but nothing had worked. He just had to take a chance, to continue in the hope that the car computer was wrong and that the Tesla would last the trip to Nimbin and back without running out of battery. He had read an article about this before he bought the car. How long trips became stressful due to the fact that one couldn’t just roll into a petrol station. One was dependent on reaching one’s destination.
It reminded Andrew about life as a student, always driving around with the fuel gauge on yellow. The engine of his Mitsubishi Magna had become so used to running on fumes that it had broken down the first time he filled it up with a full tank.
Andrew was on his way to Nimbin to look for Frank. Not just because they needed him to update the Tuna Life app – he also wanted to know why Frank hadn’t been honest about his background. Why had he wanted to start a company with Andrew and Ken? Why hadn’t he told them he was a millionaire who didn’t need Andrew or Ken? Andrew already knew the answer to some of the questions: Frank Geitner was wanted by the Interpol, he had hacked into the intelligence agencies of various countries in the 1980s, and one of those countries had been the US. But it didn’t explain why he had wanted to start a mobile app company with Ken and Andrew. It didn’t explain why he had hidden malicious code in the Tuna Life app.
Andrew wasn’t sure what he should believe anymore. Frank was a criminal hacker, a criminal hacker who had been on the run from Interpol for two decades. But he had never actually stolen anything. He had never stolen any information from the various intelligence agencies he had hacked.
Why would such a person create a virus in the Tuna Life software? And why had he hired a virus expert, and then asked the same expert to review his code? Why risk revealing himself? There was something that didn’t add up. Andrew had no idea what it was. But something definitely didn’t add up.
The only way to find an answer was to locate Frank.
Andrew arrived in Nimbin around eleven in the morning. If the Tesla attracted attention in Main Beach it was nothing compared to what it did in the main street of Nimbin. The greenies lined up to have a look. And Andrew, with his slick haircut and Calvin Klein jeans, was suddenly not a symbol of the evil capitalism anymore; instead he was a symbol of the fight against big-oil. I should have taken the Mazda, he thought as he high-fived a lanky guy with Rasta hair down to his toes. It would probably have been more environmentally friendly as well. If one looked at how much resources it took to build the Tesla’s batteries, it turned out to produce a lot more CO2 than the Mazda over its life anyway. But the world wanted to be fooled. And Andrew wasn’t about to let it stop.
Andrew had intended to be anonymous, ask a few questions where he could buy the best quality marijuana, and hope that it would lead to a person who might know where Frank was. To ask somebody about buying good quality marijuana was now out of the question. If that happened he would be on the front page of the Gold Coast Times the very next day. Even the local police had taken some time off from pretending to patrol the street, and now studied the car with interest.
You didn’t have to be pregnant, with enhanced senses, to smell the sweet scent of marijuana wherever you turned, so Andrew assumed that the police weren’t too concerned about what Nimbin’s citizens were up to. Nimbin was after all Australia’s rather pathetic answer to the Netherlands’ Amsterdam. If Frank hadn’t yet left Australia, then Andrew was certain he would be somewhere in Nimbin. The problem was to find out where. Nimbin’s official population was only a couple of hundred people, but that number didn’t include all the surrounding hippie communes that Nimbin was famous for. If you included them, the population quickly rose to more than ten thousand. And it was most likely in one of those hippie communes that Frank was hiding. Richard’s property search hadn’t returned any properties owned by Frank in or around Nimbin, but Andrew was certain that he owned or rented a property here. The first time he disappeared, the very first week they launched the Tuna Life app, he had been gone for three full days.
Frank Geitner definitely had a place in Nimbin.
52
“How are you doing?” Vesna Connor had just opened the door to the meeting room without knocking. Scott Davis was caught, red-handed, taking a nap. “Hard night?” she asked with a firm voice.
Scott looked up at her with drowsy eyes. He considered removing his legs from the table, make an apology maybe? But he just couldn’t seem to get a word out. And his legs were frozen.
“I want that article about Tuna Life before you leave today. And, Scott: Go sit at your desk. This is not your office, you know, and it’s definitely not your personal bedroom.”
She turned on her heels, and closed the door before Scott was able to come up with a clever reply.
Instead he was left inside the meeting room, bewildered and embarrassed. Who the hell does she think she is, he thought as he tried to rub the tiredness out of his eyes – barging into the meeting room without knocking.
He knew she was right, of course. He had no right to use the meeting room as his own office, and he definitely had no right to take a nap in there. But that wasn’t the point. She had talked to him as if he was a small child. And as a small child who had just realised that his mum’s reprimand was deserved, Scott Davis had realised that Vesna was right.
That was what hurt the most.
He closed the laptop, and slipped it into his brown leather bag. Then he left the meeting room and the offices of the paper. Even though he hadn’t enjoyed being reprimanded by the young editor, he knew she was entirely correct. He was paid to do a job, and the time was due for him to become a proper journalist again. He had a long list of names he wanted to check out. Roman Bezhrev and his Russian friends hadn’t become internet investors overnight. They had bought and sold businesses on the Gold Coast for several years already, and it hadn’t been restricted to technology businesses. It had been all sorts of businesses.
Scott wanted to have a chat with some of the locals that had let the Russians into their businesses. How were they as investors? Were they active owners, or did they just provide capital? Did they actually add any value to the businesses they bought, or did they rape and pillage them for profits?
The first business on the list was a producer of health and nutritional products. They had a factory in Yatala, a large industrial area north of Surfers Paradise. Scott peeked out the window as he passed the massive theme parks in Oxenford, heading towards Yatala. Wet’n Wild, Movieworld and Dreamworld. The Gold Coast had once been synonymous with school holidays and beach vacations. Plummeting airline tickets and the rising Aussie dollar had turned that picture upside down. The beaches of the Gold Coast had been pummelled by heavy cyclones during the summer, and didn’t resemble postcards that could compete with Fiji and Bali anymore. The worn-out waterslides at Wet’n Wild weren’t really that appealing when you could jump on a plane to Dubai and test out your board shorts in the world’s largest entertainment park for the same price. Scott Davis glanced down at the piece of paper with the address. He needed to take the next exit.
After having taken a quick look at the factory in Yatala, from his own comfortable car seat, he made a U-turn, and headed out onto the highway again. The factory had seemed quite idle, almost as if it was closed. It actually looked like most of the surrounding factories were either closed or running on half machine as well. It didn’t bode well for the Gold Coast, Scott Davis thought. One couldn’t keep outsourcing all manufacturing businesses, one couldn’t live from cutting each other’s hair, he thought, rubbing his bald head.
He had, however, seen what he had wanted to see. It always provided extra credibility that one knew what one talked about. And Scott wanted to talk to the previous owner of Numi Healthfoods, Stephen Crane. Crane had started his business in 1987 and gradually built it up to a successful company with twenty employees and a turnover exceeding fifteen million in 2010, the last year he owned the business. A year earlier he had made the fateful decision to raise funds from external investors, presumably to allow the company to grow faster. He had wanted to launch their line of products in the US, but needed serious cash to do that. So he had let Roman in on the ownership. Quite evidently it had cost more than expected. A short year later Crane had been out of the company.
Roman Bezhrev had taken over.
Scott Davis studied the nameplate on the door. One lonely name, Stephen Crane. It didn’t look like he had a wife. Scott rang the doorbell, and a grumpy male voice answered. After a few minutes of negotiation, he agreed to let Scott inside.
Scott trudged up the concrete stairs until he reached the third floor and apartment 22, Stephen Crane’s home.
“Why are you suddenly interested in Roman Bezhrev?” Stephen Crane asked. “I called the paper multiple times back in 2010 when he stole my business. Nobody ever called me back.”
“I worked in a different department of the paper back then, the crime desk. I’m sorry if nobody responded to your requests. But let’s put that behind us. I’m here now. And I’m willing to listen if you want to tell your story.”
“You can bet your ass I wanna tell it. Roman Bezhrev stole my company. He stole my life’s work, and now I read in the paper that he’s making millions on these new tech companies. The guy is a thief, a thief and a con-man.”