“They do know their stunts,” Leah said wryly, still sore from yesterday’s training.
“They do. On weekends, however, they trekked out to ocean kayak, or kite surf, or helicopter ski—whatever caught their imagination. But it wasn’t until they got the bright idea to take a couple of pals along who just happened to be big stars that their outings began to be the talk around movie sets, and the next thing they knew, they were taking the Hollywood bigs along on their adventures. As a result, their adventures got even bigger. But what they did really well was to keep the press and paparazzi out of those jaunts.”
“Really?” Leah asked. “Do they still do it? The adventures?”
He nodded. “Cooper came up with the idea of making a business out of their love of adventure. It was expensive to stage, but there were a growing number of Hollywood moguls who wanted the exclusive and exotic outings they offered, particularly if it came with the guarantee of total privacy. So when Jack started making noises about getting out of the Air Force, they convinced him to come to L.A. and join them, like the old days. 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. That’s when they founded Thrillseekers Anonymous.”
“The stunt group?”
“That, and the members-only adventure club.” At Leah’s look of confusion, Michael said, “The motto is, ‘Name Your Fantasy, and We’ll Make It Happen.’ We cater to an exclusive clientele who want extreme adventure with a lot of privacy and can afford to have both. Whatever they want—helicopter skiing, windsurfing, volcano hiking—we make it happen, and we guarantee their privacy.”
That sounded like the coolest job on the planet, yet Leah still didn’t understand how Michael had ended up with T.A. She remembered that he liked to ski and surf and golf—all the usual guy things—but she didn’t remember that he’d ever been into extreme sports and said so.
“Oh yeah,” he said, nodding, “I’ve always been into extreme sports. That is what I was trained to do.”
“So how did you hook up with them?”
“I got out of the agency just as T.A. was starting to get a steady stream of high-profile, highly demanding and privacy-seeking clients, and Jack approached me about becoming a partner. I was reluctant at first—you’re right; it wasn’t exactly my career path. I was into extreme sports, true, but I’d never done any stunt work. And I was definitely the odd man out with those three—it was obvious they were real tight. But in the end, Jack convinced me I had something they needed.”
“Which was?”
He looked a little sheepish. “Contacts. Worldwide contacts.”
“They wanted you for your Rolodex?”
“You could say that,” he said self-consciously. “I’ve just met a lot of interesting people along the way. Granted, most of them really were terrorists, or arms traders, or financiers who supported radical governments with the drug trade—but I’ve also met some solid, law-abiding people who knew how to get things done. Jack and the guys wanted me to bring those contacts to their organization . . . along with the utmost secrecy by which I’d cultivated those contacts.”
“What are you saying?” Leah asked, confused. “You know kings and queens?”
Michael laughed. “What I’m saying is, if one of our clients is on a remote-island hike and wants a particular foie gras flown in at a moment’s notice, I’m the T.A. guy who actually knows what foie gras is, but more importantly, I know where to get the best foie gras and how to get it to that island. Or if we have clients that want to hike some of the greatest red canyons in the Middle East for one of their adventures, I know who to call. Those sorts of contacts.”
“Wow,” Leah said, in awe. Here was Michael, the guy she’d loved and lost, the same guy she believed had been a very cute financial director with a pocket protector. It was a little hard to absorb that he was, in fact, some globetrotting sports guy with more contacts than Elvis. “Sounds like the CIA trained you well,” she said, for lack of anything better to say.
“Yeah,” he said. “They did.”