Blood Money by Paul Silvestri

Author:Paul Silvestri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective, police, thriller, crime, london
Publisher: Belmont Books
Published: 2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

The N204 from Nice to Cuneo is more a switchback than a road, and sections of it have been used to separate the boys from the men in the last hours of the Monte Carlo Rally, some of the boys landing up on the bottom of the myriad of chasms and ravines. The road to Cuneo seems to have been designed with the idea of preventing anyone getting to this no-man's land town between Nice and Turin. Of course, there's the autostrada, which makes the Monaco-Turin hop a shopping trip, but it's the old road, of deep crevasses, gaunt mountains and tinkling waterfalls streaking silver among the pines, that road which Arafi's party in the four Mercedes took the next morning.

Hakimi rode as usual in front, chauffeur-driven in a black Mercedes 220. Sheikh Arafi rode in the second car, three French officials with him and the chauffeur, so it was a tight fit for everyone inside that Mercedes. Castle rode alone in the back of the third Merc. He, too, had a Hertz chauffeur who spoke English and had travelled everywhere and said he had his shirts tailored in London, and talked about all the important people he knew and, after half an hour of this, had bored Castle stiff. In the fourth car, a chauffeur and two more French officials.

Hakimi had told him, like a nanny, carefully explaining the details of an outing to a child, that they were going to a French factory plant near Tende, just this side of the Italian border. Sheikh Arafi was to inspect some installations. For Castle's information, these installations were guarded by military personnel. So, the only security problems involved the journey there and back.

Castle had nodded. Castle didn't care too much. He'd just had a night's sleep on the problems of yesterday and found some of them were not resolvable. Like Hakimi knew a lot about the people in the BMW and was not telling Castle. Well, that wasn't good enough. But he wasn't about to start a tendentious row. He'd decided he'd call the Yard at five-thirty tonight, just when Mayfield would have left the building, but while DCI Hammond was still there. He would tell Hammond he was pissed off and coming home. Hakimi had said in the nanny speech there was a possibility that Arafi, if the morning's trip went well, might pull out tomorrow, heading back for Bahrein. There were, de facto, a priori, and phrases from other dead lingos, things that Castle would not do, lengths to which he would not go, calls beyond acceptable duties. It was as simple as that he was not of a mind to accompany Arafi back to the khaki deserts, fly-swat in one hand, and binoculars in the other, searching forever the burning dunes for the thin-faced assassin of the Wellesley Clinic. Sod the lot, he was off. He had not told Hakimi yet.

He sat in the Merc on the road to Cuneo, with the only concession to his

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