PROLOGUE
‘YOUdo not need to couch your diagnosis in soft terms. Please tell me the reality of my situation.’
The neurosurgeon looked across his desk at his VIP patient. He did not doubt that Sheikh Bandar bin Saeed al Serkel meant his brave words. But he wondered if the Sheikh was really prepared to hear that his odds of surviving were the same as those the bookmakers were giving on the Sheikh’s three-year-old colt winning the Derby?
Even money.
‘You have a brain tumour,’ the doctor told him. ‘It is malignant,’ he added, impressed when the dark eyes fixed on him did not flinch or even flicker.
People usually paled at such news. But this man was holding strong. Maybe it was the Arab way—their belief that their lives belonged to Allah. Maybe he was thinking that if it was Allah’s will that he die, then so be it.
Yet the man was only thirty-four years old. To all outward intents and purposes he was a splendid physical specimen of manhood. No one would guess by looking at him that he had cancer. Or, for that matter, that he was a sheikh.
Not for him any form of Arab dress. Or facial hair. His tall, lean body was clothed in the best Savile Row suit. His long, leanly handsome face was clean shaven.
But a sheikh he was. The only son of an oil-rich zillionaire and a London socialite—both of whom had been tragically killed in a fire on board a luxury yacht—he was Oxford-educated and currently lived in England, where he owned an apartment in Kensington, a stable full of expensive racehorses at Newmarket, and a stud farm in Wales.
‘YOUdo not need to couch your diagnosis in soft terms. Please tell me the reality of my situation.’
The neurosurgeon looked across his desk at his VIP patient. He did not doubt that Sheikh Bandar bin Saeed al Serkel meant his brave words. But he wondered if the Sheikh was really prepared to hear that his odds of surviving were the same as those the bookmakers were giving on the Sheikh’s three-year-old colt winning the Derby?
Even money.
‘You have a brain tumour,’ the doctor told him. ‘It is malignant,’ he added, impressed when the dark eyes fixed on him did not flinch or even flicker.
People usually paled at such news. But this man was holding strong. Maybe it was the Arab way—their belief that their lives belonged to Allah. Maybe he was thinking that if it was Allah’s will that he die, then so be it.
Yet the man was only thirty-four years old. To all outward intents and purposes he was a splendid physical specimen of manhood. No one would guess by looking at him that he had cancer. Or, for that matter, that he was a sheikh.
Not for him any form of Arab dress. Or facial hair. His tall, lean body was clothed in the best Savile Row suit. His long, leanly handsome face was clean shaven.
But a sheikh he was. The only son of an oil-rich zillionaire and a London socialite—both of whom had been tragically killed in a fire on board a luxury yacht—he was Oxford-educated and currently lived in England, where he owned an apartment in Kensington, a stable full of expensive racehorses at Newmarket, and a stud farm in Wales.
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