Andrew closed his eyes, and readied himself for the mercy shot.
“Dolbo yeb,” Roman said, and pulled the trigger.
It was as if Andrew’s entire face exploded. The air pressure punched him backwards, and he could feel flesh being torn from his face. His ears still rang when he opened his eyes.
Was he alive?
He couldn’t hear what Roman was saying, the ringing from his ears was too loud. But he could see Roman. Roman was covering his face with two blood-stained hands. Andrew had seen the video the FBI had uploaded to YouTube, when they had attempted to make their own Liberator with a 3D printer. The plastic gun had exploded when they pulled the trigger, and the FBI had used it as an example of the dangers of attempting to print weapons at home. Andrew had thought it was the usual propaganda. Of course the FBI didn’t want the average Joe to make his own weapons at home, weapons that were undetectable for metal detectors. The Tuna Life coders had used a stronger type of plastic, a type that was supposed to withstand the force of firing a plastic bullet at a speed of several hundred kilometres per hour, but they had obviously fucked up the calculations. The Liberator had literally exploded in Roman’s hands, the very hands which now were missing a few fingers and had smeared blood all over his mangled face.
Andrew realised that he had been given a second chance. With strength he didn’t even know he possessed, he rolled to the side and grabbed the broken beer bottle that moments earlier had been used to slit Frank’s throat, and with the last strength in his body he lunged forward and stabbed the sharp edge into Roman’s groin.
Roman lowered the mangled hands from his face, and for the first time since Andrew had met him, he looked scared, truly scared. He stared down at his beige khaki pants, where a dark red stain just kept growing. His main artery had been cut wide open.
“I know you didn’t do it, Roman. I know you didn’t kill Frank’s daughter,” Andrew said.
Roman smiled. “Bob Hare knows who did it, yes,” he said, and then he collapsed.
In the corner of his eye, Andrew could see Scott Davis pushing himself up in a sitting position. He must have witnessed everything. But he didn’t make any attempt to come to Roman’s rescue.
Andrew didn’t make any attempts to stop Roman from bleeding out either. Instead he found himself staring at Roman’s eyes, fascinated; it was almost like he could see the life ebb out of his body, as if he could see Roman’s soul, if he had one, leave his body.
PART 4
87
MONTH 8
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 120
NUMBER OF USERS: 75 M
VALUATION: $1.5 BILLION
The mayor, Eddie Molan, admired himself in the mirror. He had just finished a two-week teeth-whitening treatment. He didn’t really need it; his teeth had always been pretty nice. The Colgate smile, that’s what they’d called him, growing up. But it was important to have a good smile, a white smile. He was the public face of the Gold Coast. White teeth signalled success, it signalled accomplishment.
The Gold Coast had been through some tough weeks. Eddie Molan had thought the global financial crisis had been tough; companies running out of money, and banks foreclosing and auctioning off houses. But nothing had prepared him for the avalanche of bad news that had hit his office the last few weeks. This wasn’t something one could read about in the textbooks. This was truly unprecedented.
He had been well into his task of transforming the Gold Coast into an Australian Silicon Valley. Willing capital had flowed in from Asia, companies had poured in from the whole world. A few celebrities had even started talking about buying holiday homes on the coast. They all wanted to be part of the revolution, the technological revolution happening on the Gold Coast. And of course, it didn’t hurt that the place was a pretty nice place to live, either. More than two hundred and fifty sunny days each year, and beaches that were the envy of the rest of the world. Then all had changed.
At first, rumours had started circulating about a possible serial killer on the coast. The mayor had done his best to quash the rumours in their infancy, but they just didn’t seem to disappear. Then some of the hyped-up tech companies had started to run into financial problems. It turned out that it wasn’t enough to just be popular. The new economy wasn’t exempt from the principles of business – if they wanted to survive in the long run they had to make money. The exception, of course, had been Tuna Life; the very symbol of the tech-revolution of the coast. But even Tuna Life had started to experience problems. They had become a colossal company, and with size came scrutiny. Users and media had started to pose questions, asking whether Tuna Life represented a threat to privacy. According to its user agreements, Tuna Life had authority to access every single piece of information its users had stored on their devices. Why would a mobile app require permission to turn on and off a camera? It had all been hypothetical at that stage. Tuna Life’s CEO, Andrew Engels, had come out, guns blazing on morning TV, and promised that Tuna Life would never make use of these opportunities – it was just legal formulations, sentences phrased by lawyers to ensure that the app satisfied the strict requirements of the Apple and Google marketplaces, IOS and Android. In less than twenty-four hours, these legal formulations had, however, gone from being theoretical possibilities to very real. Users across the globe had reported that the Tuna Life app had taken over their mobile phones and computers. The cameras had taken unauthorised pictures, and all hell had broken out. It had been a catastrophe of monumental dimensions. Suddenly all eyes had been on the Gold Coast.
It turned out that a group of shady Russian businesspeople were pulling the strings in most of the new tech-companies on the coast.
The venture capital communities of Silicon Valley, New York and Seattle were issuing statements right, left and centre about the perils of attempting to create artificial start-up environments. The Gold Coast had attempted to create a sustainable tech community in less than a year. The US had spent decades fostering the start-up and investment culture that had spawned Silicon Valley. Now some cocky Australians had tried to do the same in less than a year – of course it had to end badly. These environments had to grow organically, not be decided by an attention-seeking mayor, and some shady Russians out to earn a quick buck. Eddie Molan hadn’t handled the situation well. He had jumped straight into defence-mode; defending everyone from teenage entrepreneurs to Russian investors.
And then the real bomb had detonated. Roman Bezhrev, the Russian investor who had funded Tuna Life and a string of other successful tech-companies on the coast, had been publicly outed as a suspect in the serial killer case everyone was talking about. The mayor had snubbed it all aside. The video, which had been distributed to all of Tuna Life’s users, was speculative and unfounded.
That was before the police searched Roman Bezhrev’s house. It turned out Roman was a collector. Inside his Sovereign Island mansion, the police found biological material that could be traced back to several of the missing women. Hair, bone fragments, personal jewellery. The police could with great certainty connect Roman to seven of the missing women.
The sad thing was that they would never understand why Roman had killed all those young women, and where he had disposed of their bodies. Roman was dead, and they would never be able to learn what had made him tick, what had driven him to murder all the women.
Because, by something that couldn’t be described as anything else than extraordinary, two of the former co-founders of Tuna Life had agreed to meet with Roman in Nimbin when he was on the run from police. It was still unclear what the reason for the meeting had been, but the theory was that Frank Geitner had organised the meeting to confront Roman. Frank Geitner’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Heidi, had disappeared from the Gold Coast five years earlier, and it was now a generally accepted theory that she had been Roman’s first victim, at least the first Australian victim. Andrew Engels had recorded the entire conversation on a laptop, and Roman Bezhrev had with a clear voice confessed to killing Heidi Voog. What had transpired afterwards was more unclear. The Gold Coast Times reporter, Scott Davis, had been shot in the back and had stumbled into the Nimbin Hotel just as a fight broke out between Roman, Frank and Andrew. Scott Davis would survive, the bullet had gone straight through him. Frank Geitner and Roman Bezhrev were not so lucky. Roman had slit Frank’s throat with a broken beer bottle, and had attempted to do the same with the former Tuna Life CEO, Andrew Engels. But Andrew Engels had proven to be a man of surprises. The former Tuna Life CEO had tricked Roman into shooting him with the Liberator, a plastic-gun made by the MakerBot 3D printer Tuna Life had won for start-up of the year.
Roman Bezhrev was now officially counted as the first 3D printed weapon fatality in the world, an honour he probably wouldn’t have appreciated much in life. According to Scott Davis, Roman had managed to wrangle the gun from Andrew’s hands. He had then prepared to execute Andrew and Scott Davis. But as the FBI had warned about on the net: Printing 3D-weapons wasn’t without its risks. The shot had proven too much of a strain on the Liberator’s plastic material, and it had literally exploded in Roman’s hands. The bullet had been slung backwards, and entered Roman’s left eye socket before lodging close to his brain.
The injury hadn’t been enough to kill him straightaway, but the cut from a broken beer bottle had. Andrew had lunged forward and stabbed Roman in his groin. Roman had been declared dead at the scene. Cause of death; heavy blood loss.
And that was the occasion for today’s press conference. Andrew Engels, the once fallen CEO of Tuna Life, was today going to be handed a medal for bravery the day the serial killer Roman Bezhrev died. And the mayor, Eddie Molan, secretly whished for this to represent the end of the string of bad luck the Gold Coast had experienced over the last few years. It was characteristic for the Gold Coast that they had been able to work through all these problems though. Real estate developers and tourism operators were again mildly optimistic. All PR was apparently good PR, because the Gold Coast had even more than before become an international icon. It also helped that they had a true success story to tell, a true real-life hero story. Andrew Engels, the founder of Tuna Life, had been ousted as CEO by the serial killer Roman Bezhrev. Now, with Roman dead, Andrew had been reinstated in his old position. It turned out that the real reason Andrew had been fired was that he had been questioning the security of the Tuna Life software. The other large external investor, Ferdeko Ventures, had invited him back to the helm, and awarded him a generous pay packet. Everything was as it should be. The audience applauded when Andrew Engels, the CEO of Tuna Life, walked onto the stage to join the mayor. Andrew wearing his usual uniform; black Calvin Klein jeans, a black T-shirt and red Converse sneakers. The mayor in a white shirt, a yellow tie, and a charcoal suit which accentuated his white teeth. The mayor grabbed Andrew’s right hand and lifted it towards the sky. The audience cheered.
88
“A lot of new faces,” said Andrew.
“Six new engineers starting today. It would actually be good if you stopped by and welcomed them later,” Ken said.
Andrew nodded. Six new engineers this morning. Two more on Thursday, and three next week. They had to slow down the hiring. They had grown so quickly the last few weeks that the once large premises seemed tiny. The Arabian-influenced boardroom had been replaced with a large oval table packed with workstations, and Andrew was already well into negotiations with the landlord about renting some additional floors in the building. Most of all he wanted to move to a new building though, but they had already invested too much in this place, and their lease wasn’t up for ten years. He knew they would have to stay.
Andrew Engels followed Ken Speis while he made his way across the office floor to the slippery slide. They were on their way to discuss some strategies for the next couple of weeks. The company had experienced an almost explosive growth after all the media attention around the death of the serial killer Roman Bezhrev. Andrew was now the most sought-after technology presenter in the Southern Hemisphere. He had even received a formal offer from a well-respected publisher. They wanted to write his biography. Andrew had snubbed the offer. He was hardly thirty years old; he still had lots to achieve, lots to prove. Come back in twenty years, he had said, then, maybe we can talk. The real reason he had snubbed them though, was that he didn’t want anyone to start nosing around in his background again. He had learnt the hard way how media could build you up, just to break you down in an instant. Success was fragile. He had stopped using Twitter, and had closed his Facebook and Tumblr accounts. It was best to keep a low profile, to never say or do anything controversial, to fly under the radar. To be politically correct. He maintained a LinkedIn profile, and his secretary, Yvonne, handled all media requests. That would have to do. He knew it was only time before some junior analyst would start raising questions why he, the leader of a big tech-company, wasn’t more active on social media. Was it an early warning sign for Tuna Life’s shareholders that the CEO didn’t understand the importance of social media? For now, they had left him alone. They had shown him respect in the difficult time after having witnessed the murder of his co-founder, Frank Geitner. Frank Geitner, who had turned out to be a wanted criminal, a fugitive hacker.
But in today’s world, a world that glorified hackers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, even Frank Geitner had been given a resurrection. Mainstream media had avoided portraying him as a criminal. It was a better story that the monster, Roman Bezhrev, killed a modern genius, a child prodigy who had done something stupid in his teenage years and paid for it ever since, a father who had lost his daughter, a hero, who in the shadows had hunted for his daughter’s killer all those years. The Netherlands and the US had even revoked all charges against him, not that it mattered much; he was dead.