I turned to Dr. Obado. “Unless you release me, nobody will know your story. The French can tell whatever lies they want about Vert/Vertu. They can kill you like dogs, and nobody will know the truth.” Dr. Obado nodded. He wanted me to make him and his loony group famous.

“My friends, listen to me.” It was the genial face of Monsieur Afrique. “We should let this newspaper boy go. The French will pay us the money, and they will let us go free. I’m telling you. So what does it matter?” He waited for someone to contradict him, and when no one did, he took me by the elbow and steered me back down the long, beige-paneled entrance hall.

“Go on, boy,” he said, pushing me out the heavy glass door onto the Rue Lamennais.

As I stumbled forward in the glare of the lights, a team of men in black uniforms rushed toward me. I cried out my ritual protest—“Journaliste!”—but the police continued their surge and knocked me to the ground. As I fell, my hand moved instinctively to shield my crotch—just before a boot landed there. A knee went into my side, and a gloved fist pounded the soft tissue under my eye. I kept shouting that I was a reporter—as if that would do any good—until an officer finally pulled me up, put my arm around his shoulder and dragged me away from the restaurant to a waiting police van.

I retained a faint hope they might be taking me back to my office or to the American embassy, but the van roared off in the other direction, around the Arc de Triomphe and down the Avenue Marceau. We crossed the Seine to the Left Bank and raced along the river, siren wailing, past the Eiffel Tower. I had no idea where we were going; none of the familiar government buildings was anywhere near here. The van turned into a narrow street called the Rue Nélaton and stopped in front of a plain office block with a black marble façade. Above the door were the words MINISTÈRE DE L’INTÉRIEUR. I later learned that this was the headquarters of the French internal security service, known as the Direction du Surveillance de Territoire, or DST. Two men in plain clothes escorted me from the van to one of the upper floors of the building, where they put me in a small, windowless room and closed the door.