Read Online The Tower by Michael Duffy - Free Book Online

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