Сидни Шелдон (Sidney Sheldon)Annotation
Sheldon's sweeping saga of greed and betrayal, sabotage and danger, and the ties that can kill...
Roffe and Sons is a family firm, an international empire filled with desperate, cash-hungry family members. At its head was one of the wealthiest men in the world, a man who has just died in a mysterious accident and left his only daughter, Elizabeth, in control of the company. Now as this intelligent, tough, and beautiful young woman dares to save -- not sell -- Roffe and Sons, she will have to outwit those who secretly want her power, and the unknown assassin who wants her life.
Bloodline
Sidney Sheldon
For Natalie
with love
‘The physician will carefully prepare a mixture of crocodile dung, lizard flesh, bat’s blood and camel’s spit…”
—from a papyrus listing 811 prescriptions used by the Egyptians in 1550 B.C.
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1
Istanbul.
Saturday, September 5.
Ten p.m.
He was seated in the dark, alone, behind the desk of Hajib Kafir, staring unseeingly out of the dusty office window at the timeless minarets of Istanbul. He was a man’ who was at home in a dozen capitals of the world, but Istanbul was one of his favorite cities. Not the tourist Istanbul of Beyoglu Street, or the gaudy Lalezab Bar of the Hilton, but the out-of-the-way places that only the Moslems knew: the yalis, and the small markets beyond the souks, and the Telli Baba, the cemetery where only one person was buried, and the people came to pray to him.
His waiting had the patience of a hunter, the quiet stillness of a man in control of his body and his emotions. He was Welsh, with the dark, stormy good looks of his ancestors. He had black hair and a strong face, and quick intelligent eyes that were a deep blue. He was over six feet tall, with the lean muscular body of a man who kept himself in good physical condition. The office was filled with the odors of Hajib Kafir, his sickly sweet tobacco, his acrid Turkish coffee, his fat, oily body. Rhys Williams was unaware of them. He was thinking about the telephone call he had received from Chamonix an hour earlier.