I am Jackie Chan [antikvár]

PROLOGUE: TAKING FLIGHT I'm standing in the sky on the roof of a glass and steel office tower in Rotterdam, Holland. There are twenty-one floors of air between me and the concrete pavement below. I am about to do what I do best. lam about to jump. My stuntmen tell me that the fall is safe—^well, not safe, but maybe a little less than deadly. Of course, they've only tried the jump from the sixteenth floor . . . and, as I watched the test footage late last night, alone in our production offices, I realized that a sixteen-floor fall was too predictable. Too . . . possible. After all, my producer has been bragging to reporters that this will be the world's most dangerous stunt. And who would I be if I didn't live up to my press? Not Jackie Chan. So, against the advice of my director and my costars and the executives at the studio, I have decided to add five stories to the stunt. That's sixty more feet of very thin air through which my forty-five-year-old body will be sliding. A few more seconds of excitement for the cameras. A few more screams fi-om an audience starving for adrenaline. The formula is simple: The more terrified my friends and family are, the more satisfied my fans will be. Aiid they mean everything to me. They come to the theaters hungry for a hero, for someone who can laugh at disaster, who can make funny faces at death. Someone who can show them for real that the only thing to fear is fear itself But whoever said that never stood on a roof in Rotterdam. He never looked down over the edge of a skyscraper to see a foam target 250 feet below. From here, the mattress looks like a