Chapter 39
Zack
If Zack hadn’t been doing so many late shifts at the office lately, if he’d spent more time at home working on his failing marriage, he might never have found out what Lewis was up to.
Zack should have been at home helping to plan for Christmas but was here because, as usual, he was avoiding going home.
Not wanting yet another argument, another drama.
On top of that, Charles was putting a lot of pressure on him.
Profits were down, the competition was marching ahead, the big tech companies were eating up everything in their path and, if things didn’t improve soon at Gravitas, they would have no choice but to sell up.
Some big conglomerate would come in, strip them for assets and fire the management team.
Zack could, of course, go and find himself another job.
But he considered himself to be part of this family.
Charles was the father he’d never had, and he considered himself to be the son Charles had always wanted.
He still wanted to impress him. To show him that he could turn things around, and not only because it would make him more secure if he and Miranda got divorced, which was looking increasingly likely.
The frustrating thing was that Charles still refused to embrace apps and software as the future.
Zack had been telling him they needed to get into AI for a long time, but Charles was convinced they should stick to what they knew.
Drones. Equipment for hospitals. Plus their bread and butter: cheap consumables for the home market.
But Zack knew that if they lost one big contract, they would be screwed.
They needed to find young blood, new ideas. Embrace the future.
So here he was, going through CVs from kids, most of them young men, applying for internships at the company.
Bedroom coders. Amateur app developers. Funnily enough, the idea had originally been given to him by Lewis, before he was fired.
Lewis was convinced this was the way forward: to find a way to harness all the talent out there for the benefit of the company.
He had spent most of his time searching for that unicorn; a genius who would have a brilliant idea and the ability to make it real.
After Lewis had been sent packing by his dad, for wasting time and money and achieving nothing, Zack had secretly continued the practice, dedicating a couple of hours a week to it.
So far, despite a few promising leads, he hadn’t managed to find any unicorns. Just a lot of lame ponies.
These CVs – or résumés, as their American head of PR insisted on calling them – arrived daily and were swept automatically into a shared folder.
They were mostly from school leavers and graduates.
This was the pool from which, Zack hoped, he would find someone who would help save the company.
Could one of them be sitting on a magical idea that would turn Gravitas’s fortunes around?
Half asleep, Zack clicked through the CVs, marking the ones that seemed more interesting – the ones who seemed capable of writing something without using Chat GPT – then went to the jobs inbox to hunt down the covering emails, because these would be more likely to tell him if this person had the spark he was searching for.
He had been searching for almost an hour and was thinking about dragging himself home when he came across the CV of a kid from Coventry called Samir Anand.
His covering letter stated that he had dozens of ideas for apps that could become huge, break-out tech hits ‘but I need someone to give me a chance to prove it’.
He’d aced his GCSEs but didn’t want to go to university and rack up a huge debt.
‘I want to start work now, and I’m willing to work hard. ’
Zack had said something similar in his application to work for Gravitas, and Samir’s CV was the only one in this whole bunch that was interesting.
But then he noticed Samir’s email had already been forwarded to another email account. Did that mean one of the managers here had already spoken to him? He clicked through to see who it had been forwarded to, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The email had been sent to Lewis.
That made no sense.
Lewis had left Gravitas two years ago. So why had Samir’s email been forwarded to him?
Had it been done by someone in HR? Or had Lewis come into the office himself?
Was he still, after all this time, pursuing his idea of finding a unicorn in Gravitas’s ‘slush pile’?
Zack tingled at the thought of it. If he found evidence that Lewis had snuck back on to company property when Charles had expressly forbidden it or, more likely, had kept the passwords that gave him access to the server, Charles would be furious.
This would be a good thing to take to Charles.
To remind him, if he needed it, that Lewis should never be allowed to return to the business.
To remind Charles, too, that Zack was loyal.
Zack printed out the CV and letter, which included Samir’s address and social media usernames, and took them home with him. He looked Samir up on Instagram and TikTok, but his accounts revealed little. Despite his promising CV and email, he seemed like a very average teenager.
But the mystery was intriguing and the chance to get one over on Lewis was tantalizing. Before going to sleep, Zack had made a decision: he was going to go and see this boy.
Because what if Lewis had done it? What if he’d found their long-sought unicorn?
Zack was on his way to knock on the door of the address on Samir’s CV when he saw the kid coming towards him, head down, water bottle in hand.
He was wearing a backpack and had his phone in his other hand, headphones on, completely oblivious to the middle-aged man who waited till he’d passed before following him.
Samir stood at the bus stop on the next street, and Zack waited beside him, pretending to look at his own phone.
Samir didn’t even notice him. He spent the entire bus journey scrolling, with Zack two seats behind him, enjoying himself.
It was like being a spy in an old movie.
The bus went into the city centre, and Zack expected Samir to get off there, but no – he stayed on until the bus had entered another residential area.
Zack counted to three then followed him.
It was much quieter in this run-down area of town, and Zack hung back as much as he could.
He followed him down one street then another, until Samir stopped in front of a row of lock-up garages.
The garages were crumbling, the metal doors rusting, litter piled up all around.
It looked like the place where Jodie Foster found that severed head in Silence of the Lambs.
Zack hung back and watched Samir unlock the unit on the far right, pull up the door and slip inside, closing it behind him with a rusty squeak.
What now?
Zack crept closer to the lock-up and put his ear to the door.
He couldn’t hear a thing. He was trying to figure out what to do when he heard footsteps approaching from further up the street.
It was a group of dodgy-looking guys in hoodies.
Tough men in their early twenties, one of them openly smoking a joint.
They ignored him after a quick once-over then opened the lock-up next to the one Samir had gone into, clanking the door shut behind them. Drug dealers, Zack thought.
He was wondering whether to knock on the door of Samir’s lock-up when he sensed someone else approaching. He turned around.
It was Lewis.
Like Samir, Lewis was walking along with his eyes on his phone, which gave Zack enough time to slip around the side of the building, hiding in the trees there. He heard the metal door open, and Lewis, in his unmistakeable flamboyant voice, say, ‘Did you fix that bug?’
Samir’s reply was muffled, but from the snatch of conversation Zack overheard – the mention of servers and databases and UX – it was clear that Zack had been right. Samir, who sounded timid, far less confident in real life than he had in his CV, was working for Lewis on some kind of project.
But why on earth was he doing it here, in this seedy spot, far from Samir’s house and Lewis’s flat in Birmingham? It seemed clear that Lewis really didn’t want anyone to see him and this boy together. Surely that couldn’t just be because he’d stolen Samir’s CV from his dad’s company.
It had to be something bigger.
Something he wanted to be kept secret.
Could Samir really have come up with something great? An Uber or a Twitter or a PayPal? Something that would make Lewis a billionaire?
Zack laughed darkly. Lewis was already a twat. With a billion pounds? It didn’t bear thinking about.
Zack waited by the side of those lock-ups for an hour, figuring out a plan.
He was tempted to text Charles and tell him what was going on, but decided he wanted to do this himself.
He wanted more information before going to Charles and telling him Lewis had been stealing CVs.
Wanted to know exactly what these two were working on.
Hungry and thirsty and with his bowels starting to send warning signals to his brain, he had been on the verge of heading off, vowing to come back later, when the garage door shuddered and made that squeaking sound, and then Lewis was coming out.
He sounded angry. ‘I don’t want you to fucking leave this place till you’ve got it sorted.’
Samir said something inaudible.
‘Cry me a river. Do you want to be rich? Do you think Steve Jobs had to get home to his mum for dinner? I don’t care if you have to spend Christmas Day here. Call me when it’s done.’
Lewis marched away.
Until that moment, Zack had thought he might have to use threats to get his hands on whatever Samir was working on.
Pretend to be the police, make up some tale about industrial espionage that a naive kid might believe.
But after Lewis had left, Samir emerged from the lock-up looking pale and shaken and said a single word.
‘Wanker.’
When would Lewis learn? If you want people to be loyal to you, you don’t treat them like dogs.
He waited for Samir to go back into the garage and close the door, and then he knocked. He kept knocking till Samir opened the door, looking both scared and confused.
‘Don’t worry,’ he had said in a soothing tone, handing Samir his business card, which showed he was Operations Manager at Gravitas. ‘You’re not in trouble. I’m here to help you.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Think of me as your guardian angel.’ Zack grinned. ‘I’m going to save you from Lewis Grant.’