A two-meter-high wail of bricks, capped by jagged glass set in concrete, surrounded four hectares of perfectly manicured lawns that stretched over roiling hills. To the immediate left of the shattered gate, back beyond where Stealth and the Redwings waited with the half-track, the Howell mansion stood as a monument to conspicuous consumption. The clone of a castle in Bavaria, it looked to me like a yellow brick house with towers metastasizing from every wing or corner of the structure. With the dark woods in the background, the building actually might have achieved the medieval effect, but the television dish antennae spoiled it for me.