CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS the kind of night that made a man long to ride his favorite stallion across a sea of desert sand.
Black silk sky. Stars as brilliant as bonfires. An ivory moon that cast a milky glow over the endless sea of sand.
But there was no horse beneath Sheikh Karim al Safir. Not on this night. His Royal Highness the Prince of Alcantar, heir to its Ancient and Honorable throne, was twenty-five thousand feet above the desert, soaring through the darkness in the cabin of his private jet. A rapidly-cooling cup of coffee stood on a small glass-topped table beside him; his leather attaché case lay open on the next seat.
Minutes ago he’d started to go through its contents until he’d suddenly thought, what the hell was the point?
He knew what was in the case.
He’d gone through the contents endlessly during the last two weeks and then again tonight, flying from the British West Indies toward his final destination, as if doing so would somehow make more sense of things when he knew damned well that was not going to happen.
Karim reached for the cup of coffee and brought it to his lips. The black liquid had gone from cool to chilly.
He drank it anyway.
He needed it. The bitterness, the punch of caffeine. He needed something, God knew, to keep him going. He was exhausted. In body. In mind.
In spirit.
If only he could walk to the cockpit, tell his pilot to put the plane down. Here. Right now. On the desert below.
Crazy, of course.
It was just that he ached for the few moments of tranquility he might find if he could take only one long, deep breath of desert air.
Karim snorted. His head was full of crazy thoughts tonight.
For all he knew, there would never be a sense of peace to be drawn from this land.
This was not the desert of his childhood. Alcantar was thousands of miles away and its endless miles of gently undulating sand ended at the turquoise waters of the Persian Sea.
The desert over which his plane was flying ended at the eye-popping neon lights of Las Vegas.
Karim drank more cold coffee.
Las Vegas.
He had been there once. An acquaintance had tried to convince him to invest in a hotel being built there. He’d flown to McCarran field early in the morning—
And flown back to New York that same night.
He had not put his money into the hotel—or, rather, his fund’s money. And he’d never returned to Vegas.
He’d found the city tawdry. Seedy. Even its much-hyped glamour had struck him as false, like a whore trying to pass herself off as a courtesan by applying garish layers of make-up.
So, no. Las Vegas was not a city for him—but it had been one for his brother.
Rami had spent almost three months there, longer than he’d spent anywhere else the past few years. He’d have been drawn to it like a moth to flame.
Karim sat back in his leather seat.