ways. It’s gonna be quite a ride. Who will survive? Who will face ELIMINATION? And will our new judges be able to handle the pressure of sending home these talented girls and guys when they just don’t make the grade. Well, if you want answers to these questions: Stay tuned—because THIS…”
A pause, lasting precisely two-point-six seconds.
“Is PROJECT…”
Blinding whiteness as the lights came on.
“… ICON! ”
It was nothing short of an act of God that we’d made it onto the air. I mean, Sir Harold had practically announced our cancellation during an interview on the Monster Cash Financial Network just a few days earlier. “The Jefferson numbers stink so bad, I gotta light a bloody match every time I walk in the studio,” he’d raged, with his usual thumping of the table. “Nigel Crowther is absolutely bloody right: A prime-time franchise that can’t give us twenty million eyeballs a week needs to be put down.”
A few people at Zero Management—including Stacey, the emotional receptionist—never showed up to work again after that. They just assumed it was all over.
But then… well, some extraordinary luck. Sir Harold became distracted. The entire executive board of Big Corp became distracted, in fact. The problem was Rabbit’s German division. Those “local difficulties” it had been experiencing for the last month or so? They’d suddenly become a lot more urgent.
As I learned from the reports in ShowBiz, Rabbit had for years been producing a live Saturday night “bingocast” for one of Germany’s largest broadcasters. But now the show, Bingo-Bitte!, had been exposed as a huge scam. Basically, a handful of employees of Rabbit Deutschland had figured out a way to hack into the Bingo-Bitte! computer (operated on air by two fulsome-breasted teenagers in Bavarian-maid outfits), which meant they could predict the numbers called with a hundred percent accuracy. This wouldn’t have been of much use, of course, unless the hackers had also been able to make their own bingo cards… or unless, say, the largest printer and distributor of Bingo-Bitte! cards happened to be a daily tabloid newspaper, Schnelle Lesen, which was yet another subsidiary of…
Yeah: Big Corp.
Having already broken into the Bingo-Bitte! computer, it wasn’t much of a leap for these algorithm-savvy Teutons to start meddling with Schnelle Lesen’s presses—and before long, they’d fixed the entire game, allowing them to collect several million euros per week in winnings, via the generously bribed friends and family members who played on their behalf. As a criminal enterprise, it was brilliant. And like all brilliant criminal enterprises, it couldn’t last forever. Eventually, one of the players got nervous and turned himself in, worried that someone else would do it first. One plea bargain later, and the Berlin Fraud Squad knew everything.
At first, they thought the scheme had gone on for a few months, making the “Bingo Betrügers” some ten or twelve million euros each. (The whistle-blower had been one of the last to get involved.) But then more evidence emerged: The Bingo-Bitte! hacking had in fact gone on for years—which meant the illegal winnings weren’t in the millions at all. They were in the billions. Worse: An official at one of Berlin’s most-respected auditing firms appeared to be in on the ruse. As a result, Rabbit’s broadcasting license had been temporarily revoked, and Sir Harold, along with his most senior Big Corp lieutenants, had been called to give evidence to the Bundestag. Suddenly, the company was having to contemplate the possibility of arrests, bail conditions, and extradition demands—not to mention dual investigations by European Union officials and US financial regulators. Sir Harold had made a lot of powerful enemies since using the cash from his father’s gold mine to buy his very first newspaper in Cape Town.
Now it was their payback time.
Given all this, it was hardly surprising that the ratings of a televised singing competition were no longer at the top of Big Corp’s agenda. And thank God for that, because the first live episode of season thirteen was terrible. Not can’t-take-your-eyes-off-the-TV terrible. More like switch-off-the-TV terrible. Something about it just didn’t work. It seemed dull, spent; an exhausted, obsolete franchise. Which meant we had to find the cause of the problem, quickly, and put it right before the Big Corp Gulfstream got back to LAX. A week of interrogation by angry Germans wasn’t exactly going to put Sir Harold in a very patient mood.
Here was the big surprise, though: Bibi wasn’t the issue.
In fact, Bibi’s performance during the first show at Greenlit Studios had been the strongest