Wedding Survivor Read Online Free PDF Page A

important, and amazingly without a lot of forethought, what Eli and Cooper proved adept at doing was keeping these jaunts out of the press. In fact, they became masters at it.
    It was Cooper who came up with the idea of making a business out of their love of adventure—after all, extreme sports didn't come cheap. And an increasing number of Hollywood moguls wanted the exclusive and exotic outings they offered, particularly if the adventure came with the guarantee of total privacy.
    When Jack started making noises about getting out of the Air Force—he'd learned to fly anything with wings, and was ready to move on—they persuaded their old pal to come and join them in California. They figured if they could provide their own transportation and fly their clients to their adventure destinations themselves, they'd be that much more mobile and private.
    Jack was more than willing to do it—he missed his old pals, missed the extreme sports with them. But he had one condition—he wanted to bring a friend.
    During his years of service, Jack had become friends with Michael, a fellow extreme-sports enthusiast. It so happened that Michael was also considering moving on from his job—he was a CIA operative who was growing weary of being out in the cold.
    As Jack had explained it to Eli and Cooper, what Michael brought to the table was invaluable—the guy had a contact for just about anything anyone could imagine. He'd known arms dealers, jewel thieves, opium traders. He'd dined with Saudi kings, had lived with a Parisian diplomat, and had at least two Swiss bank accounts that Jack knew of. He was a gold mine of information and resources.
    Eh* and Cooper said they didn't care about that, but could the dude ski? Repel down cliff faces? Sky surf or kite surf? Jack said he could, so a few months later, during a Lakers game one night, Thrillseekers Anonymous, or T.A., as they called it, was officially born. The four of them agreed that night that no fantasy adventure was too fantastic for them. They agreed they would not fulfill fantasies that were illegal or included illicit sex or drugs, but anything else they considered on the table. Their motto became
Name your fantasy and we'll make it happen
.
    In the last two years, T.A. had grown to the point that they were scheduling adventures monthly, if not more often. Word of their business had spread beyond Hollywood, and high-tech billionaires, European royalty, and New York real estate aristocracy, among other wealthy and famous people, sought their services.
    The adventures were top notch. They had surfed thirty-foot waves off the coast of Washington, had canyon jumped through the alpine mountains of Europe. They had forged new helicopter skiing in Canada, going where no skier had gone before. They had careened down some of the meanest Class V white waters in the world, had raced motorcycles across the roughest terrain in South America, had climbed the frigid mountains of Russia. Whatever the fantasy sport, they had done it.
    But then something peculiar happened.
    Their clients were men of power and extraordinary means. But behind every one of those men stood a woman, and over the course of a year, some of their best clients had begun to call up inquiring about the same sort of gig, usually beginning with a heartfelt apology for even asking.
    The wives and girlfriends of these men were just as attracted to the privacy T.A. offered as were their mates. But they didn't want extreme adventures—they wanted extreme social events. They wanted someone to organize an Antarctic cruise for fifty of their closest friends, or arrange an anniversary party on a remote island and give it a Gilligan's Island theme. They wanted someone to organize a girls' week out, which would include someplace very cool—floating down the Amazon River in luxury, for example. But most of all, they wanted the privacy.
    At first, the guys balked. They rarely attended social events, and usually only when one of them