Bloodline
One of Sidney Sheldon’s most popular and bestselling titles, now available as an ebook.The daughter of a rich and powerful father, Elizabeth Roffe is young, beautiful – and sole heir to a billion dollar fortune.Then tragedy strikes. Her father is killed in a freak accident and Elizabeth must take command of his mighty global empire, the pharmaceutical company Roffe and Sons. It makes Elizabeth the richest girl in the world. But someone, somewhere, is determined that she must die.From the backstreets of Istanbul to the upmarket offices of New York, Bloodline is a hypnotic tale of love and ambition, danger, intrigue and death.
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SIDNEY SHELDON
BLOODLINE
HarperFiction
An imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1978
Copyright © Sheldon Literary Trust 1978
Sidney Sheldon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Source ISBN: 9780006175018
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN 9780007380893
Version: 2014-12-10
For Natalie with love
The physician will carefullyprepare a mixture of crocodiledung, lizard flesh, bats’ bloodand camels’ spit …
from a papyrus listing
811 prescriptions used
by the Egyptians in
1550 BC
CONTENTS
Istanbul Saturday, September 5 10 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 favourites. 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 odours 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.
‘… A terrible accident! Believe me, Mr Williams, we are all devastated. It happened so quickly that there was no chance to save him. Mr Roffe was killed instantly …’
Sam Roffe, president of Roffe and Sons, the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world, a multi-billion-dollar dynasty that girdled the globe. It was impossible to think of Sam Roffe as being dead. He had always been so vital, so full of life and energy, a man on the move, living in aeroplanes that raced him to company factories and offices all over the world, where he solved problems others could not deal with, created new concepts, pushed everyone to do more, to do better. Even though he had married, and fathered a child, his only real interest had been the business. Sam Roffe had been a brilliant and extraordinary man. Who could replace him? Who was capable of running the enormous empire he had left? Sam Roffe had not chosen an heir apparent. But then he had not planned to die at fifty-two. He had thought there would be plenty of time.
And now his time had run out.
The lights in the office suddenly flashed on and Rhys Williams looked towards the doorway, momentarily blinded.
