The Tower (7 page)

There was a pause and then Ferris stood up and took the laptop out of the interview room. His partner stared at Troy for a while. Then he pulled some papers out of his briefcase and began to study them. Troy could tell he wasn't reading.

When the IA men had gone, Troy took his copy of the signed statement and wandered around the station until he found a photocopier. There was no one about. He put the pages in the top and started to make two copies. When he was about halfway through, someone came down the corridor. It was Little.

‘Still here?' he said.

Troy told him he was going home soon. They chatted about the investigation, but there had been no developments. The big news was that the man from level thirty-one seemed to have got away. All the car parks had been searched again, and there was no sign of him. The illegals were being interviewed, but all had denied any knowledge of the two men from upstairs or the gun. Bazzi was not at his house.

The photocopier stopped and Troy removed the statement and the copies, trying to hide the text from Little without making it obvious. He shook the other detective's hand.

‘Until we meet again,' Little murmured.

Outside, Troy made two calls and then wandered up Bathurst Street until he reached Hyde Park. There he stood under a tree for a while, looking up at The Tower. The rain had stopped and much of the building could be made out, soaring into the night sky. It was strangely beautiful, and he stood there for some time looking at it, populating it in his mind with all the people he knew worked there. A thousand, someone had said. He wondered if Kelly had found a sergeant to head the strike force. Eventually, after checking his watch, he walked down Elizabeth Street until he found a cab.

As they drove along Anzac Parade, Troy directed the driver to turn left into Lang Road and then into the Entertainment Quarter complex. He told him to stop down the end and got out and went over to a car parked next to the wall of the Fox film studio. A man was standing by the vehicle and they shook hands. The guy, a reporter from the
Daily Telegraph
, ran his eyes over Troy, pausing briefly at the ankles: the tracksuit trousers were about ten centimetres too short, and he wasn't wearing socks. Troy gave him a copy of the statement and then turned on his heel, brushing away questions. The reporter followed him down the road, pleading for more information about The Tower, but Troy ignored him. He got back into the cab and told the driver to return to Anzac Parade and turn left at Alison Road.

At the Shell service station he went into the shop and bought himself a bottle of orange juice. As he paid, he glanced outside at the parking spaces and saw a woman sitting in a car with the interior light on. He left the store and approached the car, and she got out.

They shook hands; her grip was firmer than that of the man he'd just met. She introduced herself as Sacha Powell of the
Sydney Morning
Herald
, and he began to tell her about what had happened. He knew McIver had spoken to her once or twice and he mentioned this, hoping there was some goodwill there. Her eyes lit up behind their glasses and he figured he was on the right track. For a moment he was tempted to lay out the political situation for her, describe Siegert's antagonism, the decision the commissioner would have to make in the morning. But he'd told himself as he was waiting in Hyde Park there was nothing to be gained by explaining all this—you didn't want to give these people any hint of your motives, it would make them suspicious. So now he stuck to the plan.

‘Will Rogers support you?' she said.

He wondered if she'd heard anything, wondered why she thought Rogers might be an issue. But she was probably just fishing.

‘Of course,' he said.

‘He's a slippery bastard.'

‘No comment.'

She smiled. ‘Why are you giving me this?' She waved the pages at him. ‘Tell me or I won't use it. I need context. Your media unit's not saying anything at all.'

He felt nervous—no, more angry than nervous—about playing games like this.

He said, ‘Do you fucking want it or not?'

She put it behind her back and smiled again. He was beginning to dislike that smile. He wondered if anyone had ever told her it made her look like a shark.

‘I have to go,' he said.

‘I need more.'

He didn't think so.

For the rest of the drive home he felt a little wild, not sure of what he'd done. He recalled the feel of Powell's cool skin when they'd shaken hands and ran his own hand along his thigh, as if to clean it. The fabric was unfamiliar and he looked down, for a moment forgetting what had happened to his own clothes.

When he got home Anna was asleep in Matt's room. He looked at them both, then closed the door gently. He and she had had a good life together, once. They'd argued about it, when she first started sleeping in the other room, but not anymore. He wasn't sure which was worse, the arguing or the not arguing. Right now, though, he didn't really care. He went to bed and fell asleep immediately.

MONDAY

Six

R
andall swung his Audi through the tunnels beneath the city and came up by the Automobile Club. He dropped down a gear and then opened up as he shot across Circular Quay, the bridge hanging high on his right. A minute later he was on it, zooming over its gentle rise in one of the few northbound lanes. They restricted them in the mornings, to allow for the flood of cars coming from the opposite direction into the city. There wasn't much sign of the flood yet: Henry Wu was an early starter.

At North Sydney, Randall turned off the freeway and made a hard right, then dived into the warren of streets that blanketed the peninsulas of Neutral Bay and Mosman. His flat was not too far away; after the business at The Tower last night, he'd gone back to Kristin's place in Edgecliff. The traffic running against him now, on the smaller roads, was heavier. He hoped to Christ he could finish with Henry quickly, get back onto the bridge before it clogged up. One of Randall's definitions of happiness was Driving Against the Traffic. You lived like he had, saw enough cities, and every extra hour you spent staring at someone else's tailpipe hurt.

But then, as Henry was presumably going to sack him, he wondered why he cared. When he'd called Wu last night to give him the news, he'd expected the fellow to be grateful for the heads-up. But it hadn't been like that at all, and later Randall realised it was the publicity: something like this could end up hurting a building's leasing potential. The Greens, the NIMBYs and all the other wackos were just waiting for the next scandal so they could escalate their criticisms of the project. For some people, the fight over The Tower had become a fight for the city's soul. They didn't realise the building was there now, and there was nothing they could do about it. If they kept on demonising the place and made it difficult for Morning Star to find tenants, the whole city would suffer. The Tower was that big.

As security manager, Randall saw he might be considered ultimately responsible for the presence of the illegals—no matter how unfairly. Plus, the police had shut down the building site. You could see that Henry would be upset about that too.

Randall actually worked for Warton Constructions, and Henry Wu was their client, but he was very hands-on. Jack Taylor, Randall's boss, called him the client from hell, but someone that big could come from anywhere he liked. Wu was obsessed with The Tower project— he'd even set up an office inside Morning Star to process invoices for materials. It was a highly unusual arrangement, apparently designed to introduce the company's Chinese accounting staff to the way the construction industry in the West worked. The set-up was cumbersome and the language problems diabolical, and some of Warton's managers had quit in frustration. They said Taylor should have refused Wu's demands, but Randall knew it was not that easy. Morning Star was a booming company across Asia and around the Pacific, and it had established a relationship with Warton. Maintaining that relationship was more important than the details of any one job, no matter how big.

He'd spoken with Taylor last night as well, mainly about the discovery of the illegals. Jack had been mightily pissed off, and said that Tryon, the security company, was out, but he but hadn't actually sacked Randall. Maybe he was leaving that job to the real boss. Maybe he was waiting until he found out just what had been going on in the basement of his building project. The problem was, Randall didn't know. He didn't have a fucking clue.

He pushed the car through a roundabout a little too fast, recovered as he came out, put his foot down, and then hit the brakes as a big four-wheel drive came out of nowhere, its snout appearing from the line of parked cars to his left. Luckily it stopped just in time, and he was able to swerve around it, narrowly avoiding a Jaguar coming the other way. As he cruised into the marina car park a few moments later, he told himself he'd done well, his heart rate unchanged despite the narrow escape. There was no doubt he was a cool driver. When he was in a car, everything seemed to come together for him. Not like last night on thirty-one. That bloody cop had been cool as ice—you could see he was a man without imagination. But he'd come through and handled it afterwards. Randall wished he was like that.

He had headed for the stairs when he saw the fellow with the gun, let himself in and huddled there, uncertain of what to do. The time had stretched out and after a bit he'd taken a few steps down towards thirty when the Indian had erupted through the door and jumped at him. He could have knocked the little guy over in mid-air—he hadn't seen he had a gun. He'd seen the handbag, though, maybe that was why he'd frozen. The handbag had surprised him. He'd been paralysed, couldn't move. It was just the way he was in physical situations. He'd never been good at fighting at school, although he'd usually been able to arrange things so it didn't come up.

The Indian's gun had come out of nowhere, smacked him on the head and he'd gone down, blood in his eyes, and the fellow had been clawing at his throat. At first he thought the man was going to strangle him, but it had been the pass he wanted, the pass hanging from a cord around his neck. When they'd got that sorted out—he'd reached up and yanked the thing off, thrown it down the stairs—the man had scampered off.

He walked through the almost empty car park towards the marina. Wu's car was there, a golden Mercedes. The Chinese loved their German automobiles. Henry lived in a huge house overlooking the harbour in Mosman, somewhere near the zoo, but he liked to do private business on the big motor cruiser he had moored down here. Some days he'd sail it across the harbour to Rose Bay, get out and be taken into the city by limo. It was a roundabout way to get to work, but what's the point in living in Sydney, he'd said to Randall once, if you couldn't do things on the water?

So now, Randall thought, I'm going to be sacked on the water. It will be a first. I've been sacked before, but never on the water.

Randall pressed the buttons for Wu's boat. The gate had a keypad and speaker connected to all the vessels there, just like a security block of apartments. Wu's voice came crackling out, telling him to come out to the boat but wait before coming on board. The buzzer sounded and Randall pushed through the gate and walked down onto the pontoons, admiring the craft moored on both sides. One day, he thought. One day. He walked more slowly as he approached Wu's vessel. Henry was a mentor to him and in some ways he loved the man dearly. But he made him nervous.

Wu's boat was the biggest one there, a million dollars of fibreglass and steel lined with precious timbers and silk wall hangings. God knew how much greenhouse gas was produced by the huge engines that drove it through the water. It was so big it was ocean-capable. Wu had taken it up and down the coast, to Hobart and to the Whitsundays. The man was a modern-day explorer.

No, thought Randall, reaching the gangplank and taking a deep breath as he stopped and called out. That was the wrong word. Henry Wu was a conquistador, slashing his way through new worlds, seizing opportunities. And like anyone driven to extreme actions, he had his peculiarities. He was, to put it bluntly, fucking weird.

Henry was standing in the main cabin, coat off and wearing his captain's hat. Randall had made a joke about this. Once. There was another man with him, but even as Randall tried to make out his features he disappeared from sight. One time, over at Rose Bay, the positions had been reversed. Randall had been chatting with Wu when two other men arrived, Chinese guys in their dumb suits. Wu had taken him into another cabin, a big place with a large screen across one wall, and shut the door. Randall had stayed there for almost an hour, watching
The
Sopranos
, until Wu had finished his business with the men. Randall had tried to open the door at one point, see if he could hear what was going on. The door had been locked. At first he'd experienced a mild sense of panic, but after a bit he realised the locked door was actually a good thing. Wu kept his life in separate boxes, and really, it was best not to know what was going on in the other ones.

Wu stepped out onto the broad rear deck and called Randall on board. He had this thing that played a piping noise, a recording from the British navy, and he'd played it for Randall the second time he'd been here, piping him on board. But not today.

There was no sign of the other man in the big room, the one with all the steering and navigation equipment. Wu led the way in and stood by the chart table, pointing to the day's editions of the
Herald
and the
Telegraph
. Randall, who hadn't seen the papers yet, stood next to Wu as he pointed at the front-page stories about The Tower. Wu was tall for a Chinese, although still shorter than Randall. But height wasn't the sort of thing to worry Henry. Right now he seemed calm, as far as Randall could establish, but that didn't mean a lot.