“For money?”
“To protect his money. Almost all the women disappeared after a late night out, either working or partying. They had all been to one of Roman’s clubs, or at least been in the neighbourhood of one of his clubs. And then they vanished. Vanished without a trace.”
“So your daughter Heidi’s relation to Roman was that she worked at one of his clubs the night she disappeared?”
“Heidi was different. She disappeared during the day. But she had another relation to Roman.”
“What was that?”
“I will let you know in due time, Andrew. For now you just have to trust me. Trust that I’m correct in that Roman is the man responsible for all these women having gone missing.”
Andrew nodded.
“So the Tuna Life virus, was it just a ploy to get access to Roman’s phone and computer? To attempt to find something incriminating, to attempt to find evidence he is the one responsible?”
Frank nodded. “I tried to bug his house and his office, but the guy is paranoid. It’s impossible to get close to him, and he trusts no one. The only way to get close was to become part of his business. To develop a product he would use, because he owned it.”
Andrew threw his arms out. “So all this, starting up a company with several million users, it was all just to tap Roman’s phone?”
Frank shrugged his shoulders. “I guess so. I wanted to hear what he talked about, I wanted to know what he did. But I hadn’t expected that Tuna Life would become so popular, I hadn’t expected that we would get several million users.”
“That we would become a success,” Andrew said, reflecting on what he had just heard. “Was that the reason you sent those tweets? You needed to get out before someone recognised you?”
Frank nodded. “I couldn’t risk anybody recognising me. I had to provoke a situation, a situation that would lead to me exiting the company. I knew how Roman would handle it, how he would remove me from the official company history, how he would erase all traces of me; it would be like I had never even existed.”
Andrew considered what Frank had just told him. He struggled to comprehend that Tuna Life had been nothing more than a ploy to get close to Roman Bezhrev. Tuna Life had by far been the most important thing Andrew had ever done. To Frank it had only been a simple tool.
“Fabian,” Andrew said.
Frank nodded. “I hired him to see if he could find the virus. I wanted to see if I had hidden it well enough.”
“You know that he is dead, that he died in an accident the day after he discovered the virus?” Andrew asked.
Frank nodded. “I’m sure it was no accident. I believe Roman discovered that Fabian had information that could hurt Tuna Life, that could hurt his investment. I’m certain Roman was behind Fabian’s accident.”
“But Fabian only told me about the virus. I specifically asked him to keep quiet until I had spoken to the board.”
Frank shook his head. “He must have told others. Someone who then told Roman. I had nothing to do with Fabian’s death, Andrew. You have to believe me. I asked Fabian to look through the code because I was certain he wouldn’t discover the virus.”
“But he did discover it,” Andrew said, slightly confused.
“Well, Fabian didn’t listen properly, did he? I asked him to go through the source code. Instead he did more than was expected of him. He also reviewed the libraries and the upcoming updates. That’s where I had hidden the virus, in the libraries and the updates.”
“So when we released the updates, we also released the virus.”
Frank nodded. “I had expected you to release it a lot sooner. But you kept on holding on to the updates. I even sent some code to a Virtual-U employee, just to get you guys to speed up your release schedule.”
Andrew shook his head. Nothing was as he had believed.
“So what now? What do we do now?”
“Now we reveal to the world who Roman is, who he really is,” Frank said with a smile on his face.
73
Scott Davis was sitting alone at a wooden table in the Southport Workers Club. The clientele hadn’t changed much since he last visited the place, even though it had been more than fifteen years ago. Old faces, beaten by years of rough wind and strong sun, shared their first beer of the day. Retirees and unemployed sat scattered around flashing Pokie machines, gambling away their miniscule pension and benefits, coin by coin.
Everything was as it had always been. Scott finished his beer in one single drink. It hadn’t been a particularly good morning, and his body was longing for something much stronger. But Scott had made a promise after his wife died: He would stick to beer and wine. And to his credit, he had. His body wasn’t young anymore, and whiskey-hangovers had never mixed well with his job in the past. It hadn’t affected his work too much. He had never been one of those guys who took sick days. But he had gone to work drunk, he had gone to work shitfaced, and he couldn’t afford to do that anymore. Not in the situation the paper found itself in. Not in the situation Scott found himself in. Vesna and Human Resources were just looking for an excuse to sack him, and he wasn’t going to hand it to them on a silver plate. When all came to all, he was quite pleased he had stopped drinking the hard stuff. There were times in the past he had just wanted to die after a big night out. It had felt like his brain had been floating around inside his skull, bouncing around from side to side. It had been scary. Many a time he had thought he was going to die. That a blood vessel was going to burst at any moment, that it all would turn black. He had once written a piece for the paper, that had been meant to be a humoristic one about the death penalty, and how one could make it more humane. Scott had proposed to let death row prisoners have a big bender the night before execution. Instead of selecting their last meal, they could select their last drinks. If the night was truly epic, they would be begging to be executed. Talk about humane execution – one would actually be doing them a favour. The readers of the paper had of course not seen the humour. In general the readers of the Gold Coast Times were as dumb as batshit. Scott had been criticised for using a too advanced language, a vocabulary his readers didn’t connect with. But how did you connect with readers who didn’t understand the difference between irony and sarcasm? Scott increasingly felt like he was writing News for Dummies.
He started on his second beer, and had almost finished that too when someone who didn’t fit in walked through the door of Southport Workers Club: Roman Bezhrev. Roman barged through the door with a big Russian following closely behind. Behind both of them: The bouncer from Crazy Kangaroo. A fat bandage covered his broken nose, and a cervical collar supported his shaven head and heavily tattooed neck. The Russians stood out so badly that several of the guests turned their necks to have a peek at them. Impressive, Scott thought, standing out in this place of misfits.
Roman Bezhrev sat down at the table, facing Scott. The two bodyguards, bouncers, or whatever they were, sat down at the nearest table. The bouncer with the bandaged nose stared angrily at Scott.
“You’ve got big balls,” Roman said. “Vladimir is very angry. You attacked him, unprovoked. You broke his nose. He’s got a neck injury.”
Scott laughed it away. “How is that possible? The guy doesn’t even have a neck.”
Roman studied Scott with a cautious look. “Vladimir will be on sick leave for two weeks. He wants to press charges. He has a family, mouths to feed. I’ve asked him to wait. Wait until I have had a chance to talk to you. Wait until I have given you a chance to explain why you did this to Vladimir.”
“If Vlad here wants to press charges he is free to do so. Just be aware that I will be calling a lot of witnesses. The spotlight will be on you, and your strip club. But let’s cut the crap. I just wanted to have your attention. And I can see that I now have it.”
“You have,” Roman replied.
“I wanted to meet you face to face, Roman, so that I could tell you that I’m bringing you down. I’m going to destroy you. I know what you are, and what you’ve done. And now I’m going to expose you for the rest of the world. I’m going to expose you as the criminal rat you are.”
Roman didn’t flinch. He showed no emotions. He just sat there.
“Is that all?” he said.
“Is that all? My colleague is in a critical condition at the hospital, and you dare ask me if that’s all.”
“Is that what this is about? You think I have something to do with your colleague’s accident?” Roman shook his head. “You may be correct in that I’ve made mistakes in the past. Starting up a business in Moscow, at the height of Glasnost, is not the same as starting up a business here. Things were done differently in my home country. But I’ve changed, and Australia is my home now. I follow your country’s laws and regulations. I’m a serious businessman. And the last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to own a strip club in Australia.” Roman paused, before continuing. “But one thing is for sure: I swear that I had nothing to do with the attack on your colleague.”
“I know why you did it,” Scott said.
“Did what?”
“Why you tried to kill Mark.”
Roman shook his head again. “You’re mistaken. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Are you still seeing your psychologist?” Scott asked.
It was as if all the air in the room evaporated. “What did you just say?” Roman asked, fire blasting out of his eyes.
“I said: Are you still seeing your psychologist?” Scott repeated, leaning into the table so that his face was only a meter away from Roman’s. “That’s why you organised the attack on Mark, wasn’t it? He found out you were seeing a psychologist.”
Roman stared at Scott with piercing black eyes. If looks could kill, Roman would be a mass murderer. “Why do you nose around in my private life? This meeting is over.
Zakonchennyy.
” He rose from the table, and as if on cue, his bodyguard and the bouncer with the neck brace got up too.
“I know what you have done, Roman.” Scott said. “All those girls, I know you are the one who took them.”
“You’re mad, complete nutters,” Roman hissed.
Then he quickly left the Southport Workers Club with his gorillas in tow.
Scott remained seated. He hadn’t learnt much from Roman’s reaction, but at least now it was out in the open.
Now he just had to wait for Roman’s next move.
74
The salmon-pink walls, the yellow-white floors. The smell of old people, sick people, dying people, mixed in with a dash of industrial soap. Scott Davis had never liked hospitals, and the Gold Coast Hospital was no exception. It was actually one of the worst he had ever been to. The dislike of hospitals was a natural instinct anyway. Statistically there were few, if any, places that were as dangerous as hospitals. It didn’t help of course that you normally were there for a reason. But even if you were completely healthy, a hospital was a dangerous place to be. Many things could go wrong during a routine examination. Scott knew from his own experience. His mother had been admitted for a relatively simple procedure, she was only going to fix some troubling knees. Scott had dropped her off at the hospital on a Monday morning, planning to pick her up later that same afternoon. She had left in a casket a week later.
Somehow she had been infected by antibiotic-resistant streptococcus during the surgery, and unfortunately the little buggers had started eating her up from the inside, muscle by muscle. First, the doctors decided to amputate both her legs, and as they initially thought that had done the trick, the mood had somewhat lightened. But the small fuckers had proved more resistant than anticipated. The next thing that went was her arms. When Scott had seen her, lying there in the hospital bed, without arms and legs, tubes sticking out of her mouth and nose, he had thought that the best thing was for her to die. He had wanted to shield her from the terrible nightmare of waking up to a changed life, of going from being independent to a burden in days. It was only later he realised he had been wrong. There was nothing he had wanted more than to have spoken to his mum again. Nothing he had wanted more than to see her open her eyes again. The void she left could never be filled. It was as if he had experienced the loss of Sashi, his wife, all over again.
Scott had always viewed such things from his own perspective. For him losing his arms and legs would be a destiny worse than death. To always be a burden to others, to have someone wipe your arse. No, he would take death any day, rather than suffer like that. But when he lost his mum, he realised that someone who was truly loved would never be a burden.
He looked down at Mark Moss, where he lay in the hospital bed. Scott hardly knew him. He had worked with him for less than a year. He wasn’t family, not even a real friend. He was a colleague. But Scott sincerely wished he would survive, even if it meant he would never be the same, even if it meant he would be a vegetable for the rest of his life. And there was a real risk that could still happen. The doctor had explained that until Mark was out of the coma, it was impossible to predict whether his brain was damaged or not.
Scott lowered his large body into the small wooden chair the hospital provided for visitors. The chair creaked loudly, but it wasn’t as if he was going to wake up Mark. Scott had filled up his brown leather bag, the one his wife had given him for Christmas one year, with the remainder of the documents from his wife’s home office. He placed the bag on the floor, before getting up from the chair again. He walked over to the window, and pulled the curtains to the side to let the sun in. He looked straight out at a cemetery. Why do they always build cemeteries next to hospitals, he wondered. If you were stuck in a hospital bed, the last thing you would want to be reminded of before you closed the curtains for the night would be your own mortality. That the next stop could be a coffin.
He closed the curtains, and returned to the chair. There had to be something in his wife’s files that linked Roman to that first missing girl, Heidi Voog. Scott had still not heard back from Pradya, Mark’s Indian friend who was supposed to hack Heidi’s Facebook account. Maybe it had proven more difficult than expected?