"Good. We know where to focus. Now you're going to tell me how I can get there."
[Chapter Seven]
2:18 P.M.
Pierre Armont was forty-six, with gray temples and a body appropriate to an Olympic wrestler. He had full cheeks, a heavy mustache, and suspicious dark eyes that constantly searched his surroundings. It was an innate survival instinct.
He never went out without a tie and a perfect shoeshine, not to mention a crisp military bearing that sat as comfortably on him as a birthright. He prided himself on his ability to instill discipline while at the same time leading his men. Although he liked to command, he wanted to do it from the front, where the action was.
Here in Paris he ran a worldwide business from a gray stone townhouse situated on the Left Bank in an obscure cul-de-sac at the intersection of Saint-Andre des Arts and rue de l'Ancienne Comedie. Fifty meters away from his ivy-covered doorway, the rue de Seine wound down to the river, playing host to one of Paris's finer open-air produce markets, while farther down, rows of small galleries displayed the latest in Neo-Deconstructionist painting and sculpture. An avid amateur chef and art collector, he found the location ideal. From his house, where the French aviator Saint-Exupery once wrote, he could march a few paces, along cobblestones as old as Chartres, and acquire a freshly plucked pheasant, a plump grouse, aromatic black truffles just hours away from the countryside, or an abstract landscape whose paint was scarcely dry. It was the best of all worlds: everything he loved was just meters away, and yet his secretive courtyard provided perfect urban privacy and security, with only the occasional blue-jeaned student from the Academie de Beaux-Arts wandering into his courtyard to sketch. He was rich and he knew how to live well; he also risked his life on a regular basis.
He claimed it made his foie gras taste even better.
He worked behind a wide oak desk flanked by a line of state-of-the-art communications equipment, and along one walnut-paneled wall stood rows of files secured inside teak-wood-camouflaged safes. His wide oak desk could have belonged in the office of a travel agent with a very select clientele. However, it served another purpose entirely: it was where he planned operations for ARM.