The world's largest island, Greenland, was famous for its land area of more than two million square kilometers.
About three-quarters of the island lay within the Arctic Circle. Its average temperature stayed below 0°C year-round, and in the coldest inland regions, temperatures could drop as low as -70°C.
Greenland's indigenous population had once numbered only around ten thousand, but as the Howlett Group developed the island, the number of residents had actually decreased rather than grown.
Starting in the 1960s, the island's Inuit natives and the small number of residents who had migrated from Europe and North America were tempted by overly generous relocation offers. Over the next few decades, they moved away in waves to countries like Canada and America, leaving this bitterly cold, desolate land behind for good.
Back when the Howlett Family had needed Jay Gatsby's forged identity and a referendum among the native population to take full control of the land, such measures had been necessary. They no longer were.
In the United Nations and under international law in various fields, Greenland was still an independent country. Its citizens, however, had long since all become members of the Howlett Group and Family.
By every measure, then, the most expansive island on Earth belonged entirely to the mysterious Howlett Family. It had also become a secret continent, home to the greatest concentration of power and influence on the planet.
In Greenland's southwestern corner, near the Atlantic Ocean and Davis Strait, a little north of Nuuk City, the island's earliest major population center, stood a towering mountain with a remarkably unusual shape and geological structure, close to the sea.
The coastal cliffs looked like a cylindrical hollow, with a mountain of rock embedded inside it, over a thousand meters high and completely buried beneath thick frost and snow.