After 13 years as unquestioned leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic was left without any cards to play last night. Deserted by the people who he put through three wars, he was also deserted by the media machine that faithfully pumped out his propaganda.
In the final sudden hours he must have realised that, after the police melted away in the face of the huge crowds outside the parliament building in Belgrade, the army would stay doggedly neutral. The loyalty of his feared paramilitary police was also in question.
These last lines of his defence crumbled rapidly last night in the face of people power as the opposition led by Dr Vojislav Kostunica, organised and unified as never before, secured interior and defence ministry guarantees that they would not crack down on their own people.
A former Milosevic loyalist, army chief of staff, and key figure in the Bosnia war, General Momcilo Perisic, went to the army command to negotiate the military's neutrality against the insurgency.
But while the military top brass has been relatively loyal to the regime, the army has been generally loath to get involved in an internal policing operation. During the past decade the army has consistently been neglected by Mr Milosevic in favour of his well-armed and well-funded praetorian guard, the 120,000-strong interior ministry troops, who were the president's shock troops in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and Kosovo.
In any case the pace of events on the ground last night in Belgrade was creating its own new reality and it appeared Mr Milosevic's survival options were increasingly focused on flight abroad.
He may well be able to buy himself a safe haven. All through the 1990s, his regime has been stripping the assets of the Yugoslav state and salting them abroad - in Cyprus, in Russia, in China and other offshore treasure chests.
A sign of panic from the Belgrade regime surfaced in Moscow at the weekend when crony companies of the regime in Russia were ordered to repatriate their assets to Belgrade in apparent preparation for their appropriation by the Milosevic clan.
Ms Borka Vucic, the septuagenarian head of Serbia's biggest bank, Beobanka, and a kind of godmother to Mr Milosevic, is reported to have made two visits to China in the past two months. The regime is reported to have put $200 million in Chinese banks.
Ms Vucic is Mr Milosevic's key financier. Mr Milosevic himself headed Beobanka in the early 1980s and Ms Vucic has been a faithful acolyte for 15 years. She worked in New York and London before becoming boss of Beobanka in Cyprus, the biggest offshore bank on the island, and masterminding the asset stripping of the early 1990s aimed at counteracting UN sanctions.
Western officials in the know describe Mrs Vucic (74), and a lifelong communist who fought with Tito's Partisans against the Germans in the second World War, as the most formidable banker of post-1945 Yugoslavia.
She has been unfailingly faithful to Mr Milosevic and his orthodox communist wife, Ms Mirjana Markovic, regarding him as a proxy son after losing her own son in a car crash, western bankers said.
The favoured boltholes for Mr Milosevic, his wife, his daughter and son are Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and China. Yesterday in Moscow the smart money was on Belarus.
The former Soviet foreign minister, Mr Alexander Bessmertnykh, said yesterday that Mrs Markovic could be in Moscow within days, though Mr Milosevic's elder brother Borislav, the Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow and the alleged source of the information, instantly denied it.
As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council which voted to set up the Hague war crimes tribunal on former Yugoslavia in 1993, Russia would be in an extremely awkward position were it to afford the Mr Milosevic family asylum. Mr Milosevic faces charges of war crimes in Kosovo and charges relating to war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia are also being prepared.
But that does not mean that the Kremlin may not be organising an alternative shelter for Mr Milosevic. Belarus fits the bill because Moscow has influence there and the authoritarian regime of its president, Mr Alexander Lukashenko, is sympathetic to the Serbian strongman.
European Union officials in Brussels, speaking privately, indicated that the exit plan was raised in talks between Russian and German and French leaders in Moscow last week.
The US military are closely monitoring Yugoslav airspace for any unusual air traffic, particularly by the Falcon or DC-10 aircraft favoured by the Milosevic regime.
NATO aircraft are reportedly under orders to scramble and intercept any flight attempt and force the aircraft to the ground, reports that have resulted in warnings in Moscow that any attempt to prevent Mr Milosevic travelling to Russia would be seen as a hostile move.
For a decade, ever since Mr Milosevic turned tanks against his own people on the streets of Belgrade in March 1991 and before he launched wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, a widespread view has been that the president would go down fighting, not against Croats, Muslims of Bosnia, or Kosovo Albanians, but against his own people in the country he destroyed.
As long ago as 1991, the demonstrators on the streets of Belgrade compared Mr Milosevic with Saddam Hussein and predicted that he and Mirjana would suffer a similar fate to that of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in neighbouring Romania, who were executed at Christmas 1989.
The other widely predicted view was that Mr Milosevic, having killed Yugoslavia and turned himself into the biggest menace to European peace since the Nazis, would end it all as Adolf Hitler did in his bunker in 1945 - by killing himself just as his preacher father did in 1962 and his schoolteacher mother did 10 years later.
Ian Traynor is Moscow correspondent for the Guardian. He reported Milosevic's 1991 war against Croatia