Frenzel called me thirty seconds after Reuters moved its bulletin. “This is a pretty good story,” she said. “Bowman is hearing that the State Department may evacuate the embassy. Weiss says you can have all the space you want. So let it rip.” She sounded almost excited. “This restaurant is near the bureau, isn’t it?”

“A few blocks. The police have closed off the quarter. They gave me a pass to get to the office.”

“Well, keep your head down.” Frenzel was allowed to say that. She had taken a bullet in the leg ten years earlier while covering the civil war in El Salvador.

The French government issued a statement at 7:30 that was broadcast live on radio and television. A spokesman said the charges made by Vert/Vertu were “groundless,” “laughable” and “completely untrue.” The statement said the French government was prepared to negotiate only the surrender of the “enviro-terrorists” and warned that unless they agreed immediately to leave the building, they would “pay a heavy price.”

The French statement elicited a quick response. At 7:45, the door of the restaurant opened and a man in a white outfit was pushed out the door. I watched it live, on television. The man turned out to be an Algerian busboy. He was carrying a written message from Vert/Vertu. He had been told that unless it was read immediately on television, the sommelier of the restaurant would be shot. The Algerian stood before the camera and nervously read from the piece of paper in his hands. The message said that if the French government didn’t meet its demands by midnight, Vert/Vertu would begin exposing the hostages to the radioactive materials it had brought from Africa. “The death of the hostages will prove the truth of what we are saying,” the statement concluded.

This was a hell of a story. I sat down at my computer and began trying to pull something together for the first edition. I cribbed from the wires, from the French and Vert/Vertu statements, from the television coverage, from the clips Pascale had found me. I even threw in a paragraph describing the main dining room where the hostages were being held, based on my one visit to Taillevent. I tried to reach my best contact at the French Foreign Ministry, but he wouldn’t take my call, and the press officer at the American embassy was useless. He sounded nervous about being in the office at all. So I typed—to call it writing would be generous—throwing together shards and snippets of other people’s work, casting an eye occasionally at the live picture of Taillevent on television. That was as close as I came to reality. I finished up my story and filed it for the first edition.