Direct Action
“38 RUE FOUQUET, CLICHY TOM’S BREATHING WAS SHALLOW as he pressed the minuterie button on the ground floor then sprinted up the first flight of worn marble stairs. The safe house—safe apartment, really—was a troisième étage (fourth floor) walk-up located about a hundred yards north of the gridlocked six-lane périphérique highway that encircled greater Paris. The 4627 Company had six safe houses in Paris—one more than CIA. But then, 4627 probably had more use for them than Langley did these days. This one was located in a run-down, anonymous working-class district favored by foreign workers and transients.
The five-story building on a one-way street had sagging, weatherbeaten shutters and a crumbly stone facade. It was a relic from the mid1920s, and had it been located inside the beltway, even in the less-than-chic nineteenth or twentieth arrondissements, it would have been worth a pretty penny. But in Clichy, one of Paris’s more unfashionable communes périphériques, it was just another... dump, similar to scores of identical buildings sandwiched in the rough triangle between two decrepit cemeteries and the perpetually bustling beltway.MoreLess
The five-story building on a one-way street had sagging, weatherbeaten shutters and a crumbly stone facade. It was a relic from the mid1920s, and had it been located inside the beltway, even in the less-than-chic nineteenth or twentieth arrondissements, it would have been worth a pretty penny. But in Clichy, one of Paris’s more unfashionable communes périphériques, it was just another... dump, similar to scores of identical buildings sandwiched in the rough triangle between two decrepit cemeteries and the perpetually bustling beltway.MoreLess
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