The shoot was already in motion by the time the convoy crested the winding road, and the location introduced itself the way only obscene money can.
The mansion stood white and gleaming at the very crown of the cliff — less a building than a declaration of war upon modesty, perched upon a great shoulder of ancient rock that the lake below had been arguing with for ten thousand years and losing with quiet, geological grace.
The wind came up off the water in long soft pulls, carrying the sweet clean scent of the lake with it, cool and mineral and faintly green, threading through the manicured gardens and setting every hedge and flowerbed whispering like courtiers at a coronation.
Far below, out of sight but never out of hearing, the water crashed and crashed against the insurmountable rock in a slow patient rhythm, the sound rising up the cliff face like applause from an audience that had arrived several millennia early and still refused to leave.
