The first police roadblock was on the Rue de Rivoli, near the Louvre. The officer was wearing the dark jumpsuit and shit-kicker boots of the Police Nationale. I showed him my residency permit and my press card and explained that I needed to get to my office on the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, a mile away. He gave me a pass that said PRESSE in bright red letters and told me to put it on my windshield. That got me past another checkpoint at the Place de la Concorde, but I was stopped again along the Champs-Élysées, several blocks from my office. By now, there were few people on the street, except for hundreds of these paramilitary police in their black uniforms.

“Journaliste américain,” I said, waving my press credentials. In many countries, that’s actually enough to get you past a checkpoint. But the French officer shook his head; he ordered me out of my car while his colleagues checked with the Foreign Ministry press department. Someone there must have vouched for me because he wrote me a special laissez-passer that gave me permission to go to my office—which was technically within the forbidden zone because it was near the Rue Lamennais.

When I got to my office, I turned on the television. CNN was showing a live shot of the building. You could see the black metal awning, with its neat crenulated edges and the name “Taillevent” over the door of the restaurant. A few police were moving in the foreground, but otherwise the narrow street was empty. The French television networks were showing the same picture. The commentary on all the channels was garbage. Nobody really knew anything.

Pascale had gathered the wires and put them in a neat pile on my desk. Next to them was a stack of clips from the French press about weapons testing in the South Pacific. She hadn’t been able to find anything on the group called Vert/Vertu, and she said in a note that her girlfriend who worked at AFP couldn’t find any record of the group in their files, either. Sweet Pascale. I was glad I had let her go home.

A little before 7:00, another bulletin moved on Reuters summarizing the demands that had been made by Vert/Vertu in a fax sent a few minutes earlier to its bureau in Paris. First, the group demanded that France acknowledge that it had been testing nuclear weapons secretly during the past two years in the deserts of Niger. Second, they wanted the French government to pay ten billion francs in reparations to Niger and the other former French colonies in West Africa. Third, they demanded safe passage from France for the hostage takers. If the demands weren’t met, Vert/Vertu said, it would expose the hostages to radioactive materials it had gathered in the deserts of Niger and brought to the restaurant.