After the first billion you stopped counting, another favorite saying. And now he was faced with disaster. Not only the promised riches of the Kuwait oilfields snatched from him, but that portion of his wealth which stemmed from Iraq dried up, finished as a result of the Coalition’s massive airstrikes that had devastated his country since the seventeenth of January.

He was no fool. He knew that the game was over, should probably have never started, and that Saddam Hussein’s dream was already finished. As a businessman he played the percentages and that didn’t offer Iraq too much of a chance in the ground war that must eventually come.

He was far from ruined in personal terms. He had oil interests still in the USA, and the fact that he was a French as well as an Iraqi citizen gave Washington a problem. Then there was his shipping empire and vast quantities of real estate in various capital cities around the world. But that wasn’t the point. He was angry when he switched on the television and saw what was happening in Baghdad each night, for, surprising in one so self-centered, he was a patriot. There was also the fact, infinitely more important, that his father had been killed in a bombing raid on the third night of the air war.

And there was a great secret in his life, for in August, shortly after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces, Aroun had been sent for by Saddam Hussein himself. Sitting here by the French window, a glass of brandy in one hand, rain slanting across the terrace, he gazed out across the Bois de Boulogne in the evening light and remembered that meeting.

There was an air-raid practice in progress as he was driven in an army Land-Rover through the streets of Baghdad, darkness everywhere. The driver was a young intelligence captain named Rashid, whom he had met before, one of the new breed, trained by the British at Sandhurst. Aroun gave him an English cigarette and took one himself.