Laura only slowly and by degrees began to loosen her hold on the armrests. The car must have reached sixty before its speed leveled off. The scenery flew by as the car flawlessly took successive forks in the road, each leading higher — progressively farther up the mountain. Laura's ears popped, and she took deep breaths to calm herself. The effort began to pay off, and her focus shifted gradually from the impending danger imagined on the road ahead to the unfolding sights that flashed by the car's windows.
Several times in the near distance she glimpsed nondescript buildings before they disappeared behind dense foliage. Through narrow gaps in the brush she saw that huge white spheres like steel balloons tethered to concrete dotted the landscape. Some were half coated in ice and vented wisps of vapor, but none bore any markings to hint at their mysterious contents. Those snapshots of Gray's works gave Laura two general impressions — the sense that everything on Gray's island was new, and that everything was industrial in purpose.
As the car ascended the steep mountain, the road cut a path every so often along the side of a hill or over the crest of a ridge.
There, vast expanses of the island came into view. A seemingly impenetrable jungle stretched far and wide, giving the island a wild and primitive look. That contrasted starkly to the appearance of the terrain that streaked by the windows of her car, which had a tamed quality to it.
Thick jungle foliage lined the road's curb on one side and formed a similarly unbroken wall that bordered the paved walk alongside the other. But the dense island flora was groomed neatly — edged and trimmed and beaten back where it encroached on the artery of man's commerce. It reached out, straining for the sunlit air laid open through its lush domain, but it had bowed — reluctantly — to the will of another. To the will of Joseph Gray.
When the road rose and curved gently through the saddle of two small hillocks, Laura saw high atop the mountain above the first hint that all was not work at the Gray Corporation. A building that looked like a resort hotel clung to the concave face of a great cliff.
Its glass walls and balconies faced what were surely impressive views of the jungle far below.
The car crested another ridge, its motor now humming at a deeper pitch as it began a more deliberate and challenging phase of its ascent. From her new and higher vantage, Laura could now see clusters of buildings — small and large — nestled at the base of the huge mountain face. The small town lay half buried in thick trees and green shrubs that seemed to spring vigorously from the island's rich soil, and where its streets ended, the omnipresent dark jungle again resumed its reign.
But as the hill that obscured her view of the terrain below receded into the distance, Laura saw that nature again gave way to the hand of man. Where there should have continued uninterrupted the thick tangle of growth, instead appeared the tidy edge of a perfectly flat, green lawn.
Laura's breath caught in her chest. Slowly, from behind the hill that had hid it until now, rose a massive white structure. Like a giant moon climbing above the horizon, the enormous building dwarfed all else within view. It sprawled across the empty field, easily fifteen or twenty stories high and unbroken by windows or doors. It was breathtaking in its scale and was surely the central focus of the island operations. The car was nearing the top of the mountain, which was curved around a steep bluff thick with vegetation. The entire island was now within view. A wide brown road fanned out behind the huge building below, and led through the dense jungle to three concrete launch pads that sat poised at water's edge. The pads were at the tips of small points of land that spread like three fingers from the end of the island: On the rightmost pad sat a squat, blunt rocket like the one she'd seen rise into the air minutes before. From the empty center pad, white smoke or steam still drifted slowly into the air.
The launch pad on the far left lay, by contrast to the others, a comparatively short distance from the giant building. That pad was also vacant, its gantry standing a lonely watch — awaiting the return of its charge.
Beyond the three pads swirled the calm greens of still beaches, the crashing whites of the surf on the island's reefs, and the trackless blues of the deep sea that surrounded Gray's kingdom. They were isolated there, remote, detached. Despite the elevation of the mountain that her car had scaled, there were no other islands to be seen. They were a small green dot in an immense blue pool. The ocean, Laura found herself thinking as she stared into the distance, was a moat. It kept Gray's secrets in, and his enemies out.
The car plunged into inky blackness, and Laura gasped in fright.
It hurtled through a tunnel, the dim lights along a railed walkway providing the only illumination until the car rounded a bend and burst back into the sunlight.
It took a moment for Laura's eyes to adjust and for her to realize that the car was braking. To her right, a magnificent mansion came into view behind an ivy-covered stone fence. The car slowed to a crawl and turned through the open iron gates.
Before Laura lay a large, cobblestone courtyard bounded on three sides by the stucco walls of the great house. Two huge gas lanterns burned invitingly on either side of the house's stately entrance, and water cascaded off the statuary of an immense, beautiful fountain at the center of the courtyard. Well-tended beds of brightly colored flowers surrounded the fountain.
The curbed roadbed cut a neat crease through it all, forming a teardrop-shaped loop of white concrete circling around the fountain.
The car pulled up to the front of the mansion, and a woman in jeans and a short-sleeve shirt came down the front steps. The winged door lifted automatically with a quiet hiss from its pistons.
"Dr. Aldridge, I presume?" the woman said cheerfully from beside the curb.
"Hello," Laura said, stepping out into the surprisingly crisp mountain air.
"My name is Janet Baldwin," the woman said with a thick Australian accent. "I'm the majordomo of the Gray household."
Laura shook hands, trying but failing to stifle a smile on meeting the first of what Laura presumed was a large coterie of people who attended to the every need of the reclusive billionaire.
"I guess that sounds a bit odd to your ear," Janet said pleasantly. A smile seemed to come naturally to her. She had sandy hair, freckled and tanned skin, and appeared to be in her mid-forties. "No need to worry, though. We're not at all formal in this house."
Laura caught Janet glancing at the frayed knee of her jeans before turning to lead her up the steps to the house. Laura surreptitiously raised her knee to quickly check the extent of her informality, then joined Janet under a portico finished in stone carvings of intricate detail. A man in a white jacket rapidly descended the steps to retrieve Laura's bag from the car, and Laura turned back to the courtyard. When the man had extracted her bag, the car's doors closed and it took off, swiftly rounding the fountain and proceeding off along its curbed roadway — driverless.
"That's…" Laura said, nodding and holding her palm out, "that's really impressive."
"What? The car?" Janet asked, her lilting accent playing out the last word. "Then it's clear you've only just arrived." She turned and led Laura through the towering double doors of beveled glass. Laura's jaw sagged on entering the mansion. Practically every square inch of the walls was covered with paintings of various shapes and sizes in the old, cluttered style of decor. Laura's heart quickened when she recognized the Impressionist strokes of the masters on several. In Gray's house, she thought, surely they weren't copies. A circular staircase swept up both walls to meet at a second-floor landing high above. Beneath the stairs, a broad hallway opened onto the rest of the ground floor.
Laura stood there, gawking like a tourist. The highly polished parquet floor was inlaid with dark marble in patterns of varying size and complexity. The ceiling above was at least forty feet high. From the center hung a spectacular crystal chandelier. The feeling evoked in Laura by the size of the entry was the same as she felt on entering a huge rotunda. That feeling was so complete that as she followed Janet across the floor, she scrutinized the inlaid marble to see whether it formed a map of the United States or perhaps of the group of islands of which Gray's was a part. There was, however, a method to the pattern of tiles.