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Mount Everest Summit Pyramid—29,015 feet

May 26, 2009

2:04 p.m. (Chinese Standard Time)

Nelson Tate Junior’s satellite position tracker was working perfectly. The sixteen-year-old’s body was not.

The tracker, a small block of orange plastic no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, was attached, as usual, on the left shoulder strap of the boy’s lightweight backpack. Despite being thrust against the hard frozen snow, the unit was still silently and resolutely going about its task of communicating with invisible space hardware orbiting hundreds of miles above. Lacking either the sensors or the programming for humane distractions, it could only ignore the young heart beating as if about to burst, just a few inches behind it.

The tracker signaled relentlessly.

N 27°59’17”, E 86°55’31”

The heart pulsated violently.

196 BPM …

Elsewhere, that latest set of electronic coordinates was being transferred onto a topographical mountain map as a kite-shaped marker. Automatically, the image began popping up onto a number of computer screens around the world, its arrival completing a dotted red line that followed a graceful, linear progression up the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest to its summit, the highest point on earth. There was still no mention of the frantically beating heart.

One screen, in particular, had been burning for hours in anticipation of that very moment. On the other side of young Nelson Tate’s daytime, five and a half vertical miles lower and many thousands to the west, it was set on a fine English mahogany desk within the warm, softly lit study of his parents’ palatial home.

Upon arrival of the latest marker, the pair, clad in silk pajamas and matching monogrammed cashmere robes, began calling out to the family members and guests specifically assembled to share this fantastic moment of unparalled achievement.

Nelson Tate Junior’s mother, Amelia, was beside herself with worry. Even if her face had now received a little too much work to fully reveal her emotions, her voice could still betray her. It did so, cracking slightly when she shouted as loudly as she dared, “Quickly, everyone. We think he’s on the summit. We’re here in the study. He may call. It could be any time now. Please hurry.”

The boy’s father, her husband, Nelson Tate Senior, was more abrupt. “Come down! Now! Everyone! It’s on!” he bellowed. It was enough to wake the deepest sleeper.

The Tates’ family and friends began to obediently shuffle into the varnished world of Senior’s wood-paneled study. Ignoring the walls filled with framed photos of their host meeting statesmen and celebrities and the shelves crammed with row after row of glittering trophies recording a career of multimillion-dollar real estate deals and corporate investments, they focused only on the computer screen at its center. Drowsily positioning themselves around the room, they stared at the slowly revolving three-dimensional image of Mount Everest it displayed. In silence the assembled group contemplated the bright red trail that now led to the summit, plundering inadequate memories of ski holidays past, trying to imagine what it must be like to be up there.

How high? How cold? How windy?

None of them could have known that they would have been closer to the answers sitting on the wing of Senior’s G5 as it flew them into Long Island.

Mima, the Tates’ aging Puerto Rican housemaid, brought in a vintage bottle of Dom Perignon champagne perched in a silver bucket of ice. An unknowing disciple of the “butterfly effect,” she gently set it on a side table, seemingly convinced that any disturbance might cause dire consequences on the top of the world. When finished, she loitered just beyond the door with an expression of deep concern, her lips reciting a silent prayer to a god with whom she was familiar.

Excitement, and thoughts warmed by the prospect of vintage champagne, began to enliven the room, generating a buzzing spiral of superlatives.

“Junior’s done it!”

“He is standing on the summit of Mount Everest! Just think of that!”

“The youngest person to climb the Seven Summits!”

“The highest peak on each of the seven continents conquered! Can you believe it?”

“A new world record!”

“At sixteen!”

“No one can beat it!”

“Outstanding!”

“Congratulations, Senior.”

By summiting his seventh actual mountain, Nelson Tate Junior was indeed ensuring that once again the Tate name would be in the news. The press release was already prepared, Tate Senior’s publicists primed, awaiting only his signal to feed it, in a pre agreed hierarchy of exclusivity, to the media. Sitting there in the middle of the assembled group, Tate Senior began to imagine his study walls newly embellished with the framed summit photo in place of honor, flanked by others of Senior and Junior on the covers of magazines or with Letterman, Leno, even the President.

While he visualized the images, Senior’s agile commercial mind was simultaneously running the financial mathematics of getting Junior up into space next. Now that was really going to cost. It would make the $500,000 summit bonus he had pledged to No Horizons, Junior’s Everest expedition organizer, seem like the chump change it was—for him.

Nelson Tate Senior was looking forward to his only son’s “eighth summit”—the one that no one else could possibly afford.