When she stood back, the door closed… leaving her even more shaken than before.
'Jeez,' she mumbled — stunned that the car had understood when she had rapped her knuckles on the window. Even more stunned that it had understood when she had declined its offer of a ride.
The car sat there with the door closed again, looking for all the world like any other modern appliance. Only this lump of metal had been imbued with a spirit that set it apart from ordinary machines.
It was infused not with the blood that gave animals life but with an unseen and ethereal force much more fundamental, more universal.
That force was intelligence, sentience, knowledge.
Laura found the entire experience disturbing. The root of her disquiet lay in a primitive belief, she knew — the belief that emotion was linked to flesh. She was upset by the idea of a thinking machine because nothing scared her more than intelligence divorced from emotion. The image of the dead-eyed street thug who killed because he didn't care was scary enough. But the specter of that beast being empowered with intelligence was frightening beyond belief. It was the combination of the two — of an intellect devoid of empathy — that had led to man's darkest hours. To gas chambers and police states and… Laura caught herself. 'Snap out of it,' she muttered. Beholding the wonders of Gray's island had a certain liberating effect on her imagination, but there was a limit beyond which lay mere sophomoric rambling. Besides, some corner of her mind countered to put an end to the entire debate, surely emotion isn't limited to biological organisms.
She suddenly felt weary — not physically, but intellectually. She drew a deep breath, pulled the heels of her running shoes up to the seat of her shorts one at a time for a last stretch, and began her jog along the almost circular sidewalk.
She emerged from the shadow of the house into the marvelously sunny day, rounding the fountain at a moderate pace and heading up the drive for the gate. She wore her summer running gear — black, thigh-length stretch pants and aerobics tote — and goose bumps rose from her bare midriff in the chilly breeze. She hadn't counted on any mountains when she'd packed for the South Pacific. She hadn't counted on anything she had found there so far.
It wasn't as if she were in a different world, Laura thought. It was as if she had stepped into a different time. She had boarded a plane at the beginning of the twenty-first century and had landed squarely in a small pocket of the twenty-second.
Laura got to the gate and had to make a choice. The road that passed the house headed to the left and to the right. Without pausing she turned left toward the Village — the direction with which she was familiar.
The path that paralleled the left side of the curbed roadbed was perfect for running — the concrete slab new and wide and flat.
She looked up. The mouth of the tunnel ahead was black in the bright rays of the sun. She knew the tunnel was lit and had a railed walkway running down its full length. But when she got to the foreboding opening, she turned back and headed up the hill the way she'd come.
Laura didn't want to run all the way down the mountain anyway, she reasoned.
Gray's mansion came slowly into view over the wall of roughhewn stones lying alongside the path. The house was so beautiful Laura had to smile. Golden stucco rose to a dark gray roof of domed slate tiles.
French doors opened onto verandas at either side of the main entrance.
On one terrace a servant was now placing brightly colored cushions on black wrought-iron chairs. Another was setting a large table, and a third emerged from the house carrying a huge floral centerpiece. Green wooden shutters framed the windows of the upper floors, and still more colorful flowers sprouted from planters beneath the windowsills.
She passed the house and headed up the hill away from the tunnel.
When she crested the ridge a short while later, she saw that the road ahead descended gently through the trees. It twisted out of sight to the right as it traversed the exterior wall of the crater. A sign by the side of the path warned: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSERS.
Laura rolled her eyes in amusement at Gray's obsession with control. Her legs moved effortlessly as the downhill path fell away beneath her running shoes. Her speed rose, and she sprinted by the yellow sign with its thick black letters.
There was nothing tame about the landscape that surrounded this stretch of road. The ground was thick with chest-high shrubbery, and the jungle was dark with interwoven branches swaying gently in the breeze.
Her muscles began to warm, and the golden glow of that warmth spread slowly through her body. She glanced up at the light that danced in the canopy of trees. She wasn't a particularly religious person, but at moments like this Laura understood why others felt the presence of God.
The light filtered through the leaves in brief flashes, forming a pattern so complex as to defy description. But it was a complexity that Laura realized had been equaled by the treasure Gray had buried deep underground.
Two men walking shoulder to shoulder up the road rounded the curve far ahead. Laura came to an abrupt stop. Both men carried menacing black rifles and wore camouflage uniforms and boots and floppy jungle hats.
Behind them was a gate that was lowered across the road. A small hut off to the side was painted with alternating diagonal stripes of orange and white.
Laura turned and began to jog back up the hill.
'Hey!' one of the men yelled. She looked over her shoulder to see them trotting after her. Laura bolted — sprinting as fast as her feet would carry her. 'Ma'am!' she heard a soldier shout, but her feather-light running shoes ate up the smooth white concrete under their treads.
After almost a minute at the dead-uphill run, she looked back down the path behind her. The men had not continued their pursuit, and she slowed her pace to a jog. Laura's lungs burned from the cool air and her thighs ached from the exertion. She ground her jaws together so hard that they hurt, too.
By the time Laura got back to Gray's house, the momentary fear she'd felt on the path had metamorphosed into full-blown anger. All the things she knew about Gray came bursting out of the box into which she'd crammed them in her rush to accept the job. Why were there men with rifles roaming the island? Why were there restricted areas and retinal identifiers and black eyeballs terrorizing the likes of poor Dorothy with fears of 'thought police'?
Laura had been too hasty, she knew. She had leapt at an opportunity that had been presented to her at a vulnerable moment in her life.
She had made a mistake during a moment of weakness. It had been her life raft from a sinking ship of professional failure. But the harm caused by her mistake wasn't irreparable. The picture of the FBI card flashed through her head as she bounded up the front steps two at a time.
There was no one to be found in the house. Laura looked in the dining room, in a drawing room on the opposite side of the foyer, in a study lined with beautiful dark wood paneling. She wandered between the twin staircases toward the back of the house.
Another set of stairs led to a lower level — light streaming onto a landing one story below through a wall of glass overlooking the Village.
Laura headed down.
At the bottom the stairs opened onto a corridor that was unadorned by artwork of any kind. The hall led away from the window, back into the mountain. She heard music — a hard, driving beat. Headbanger music, her students called it, which was popular on the club scene in Boston.
'Hello!' she called out. There was no answer. She headed toward the sound of the music.
When the hallway turned right, Laura came upon a long window overlooking a spacious interior room. The music was much louder there — its strident guitar licks and thudding drumbeat pierced by lyrics more screamed than sung. Stepping up to the window, Laura saw Gray.
At least that was who she assumed it was. Laura looked down onto a windowless exercise room two stories below. It was filled with gleaming chrome weight machines, an old-fashioned punching bag, and a small basketball court. One entire wall was a rugged stone cliff pockmarked with holes where pitons had been driven for climbing. A small open door led into a squash court.
And then there was Gray sprinting on an unusually wide treadmill — sweat pouring down his bare torso. He wore a contraption that covered his entire head. His face was hidden from view by what looked like a black gas mask. A wide, flexible tube protruded from the mask and led into a small tank strapped to his waist. In place of lenses there was a semicircular black box that ran from one side of the mask to the other.
