Eye of the storm Page 0,3
then?”
“Of course he is.” Dillon smiled. “Now let’s you and me go inside and have ourselves a drink in comfort.”
In the sitting room on the first floor of the house in Avenue Victor Hugo overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, Josef Makeev put down the phone and moved to the couch where his overcoat was.
“Was that Rashid?” Aroun demanded.
“Yes. He’s with Dillon now at a place on the river. I’m going to get them.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Makeev pulled on his coat. “No need, Michael. You hold the fort. We won’t be long.”
He went out. Aroun took a cigarette from a silver box and lit it, then he turned on the television. He was halfway into the news. There was direct coverage from Baghdad, Tornado fighter bombers of the British Royal Air Force attacking at low level. It made him bitterly angry. He switched off, poured himself a brandy and went and sat by the window.
Michael Aroun was forty years of age and a remarkable man by any standards. Born in Baghdad of a French mother and an Iraqi father who was an army officer, he’d had a maternal grandmother who was American. Through her, his mother had inherited ten million dollars and a number of oil leases in Texas.
She had died the year Aroun had graduated from Harvard law school leaving everything to her son because his father, retired as a general from the Iraqi army, was happy to spend his later years at the old family house in Baghdad with his books.
Like most great businessmen, Aroun had no academic training in the field. He knew nothing of financial planning or business administration. His favorite saying, one much quoted, was: When I need a new accountant, I buy a new accountant.
His friendship with Saddam Hussein had been a natural development from the fact that the Iraqi President had been greatly supported in his early days in politics by Aroun’s father, who was also an important member of the Baath Party. It had placed Aroun in a privileged position as regards the development of his country’s oilfields, brought him riches beyond calculation.
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.
“What do you think, will they make some sort of move?”
“The Americans and Brits?” Rashid was being careful. “Who knows? They’re certainly reacting. President Bush seems to be taking a hard line.”
“No, you’re mistaken,” Aroun said. “I’ve met the man face-to-face twice now at White House functions. He’s what our American friends call a nice guy. There’s no steel there at all.”
Rashid shrugged. “I’m