THIS IS HOW SHE ANNOUNCED HERSELF:

On March 2, 2003 at 4:12 pm, I disappeared. My name is isabella v., but it's not. I'm twentysomething and I am an international fugitive.

By that time, she said, she'd been on the run for a couple of weeks. The war in Iraq had just started and she was lonely. Maybe it was stupid to start a Web log, but that was better than the temptation to pick up the phone and call somebody from her old world. In return, I suppose I have to keep you entertained. Keep you reading. That's the bargain. Keep your watchful eye on me--so that you might notice if I vanish suddenly. So that you might ask the questions that would save me.

This appeared on BlogSpot, a pioneer in the online-diary form with a clever format that includes a hyperlink for reader responses. Eight people responded to that first cryptic post, ranging from sarcastic ("Saddam! Is this really you!") to lit crit: "The writing's a bit too Palahniuk--a little too obvious about trying to sound dramatic and cool."

But Isabella pressed on with another installment. "My family is an alarmingly influential pillar of a small European country," she began, drawing a family portrait that mixed Masterpiece Theatre with The Godfather. "Seventeen generations of fiscal conservatism. Seventeen generations of dynastic preservation and succession machinations. Seventeen generations of wealth accumulation. Seventeen generations of primogeniture. Seventeen generations of sinister momentum."

It was heady stuff. "Is my father a mobster? No. Not in the conventional sense. Has my father had men killed? Women killed? Maybe."

Despite this ... my father made four mistakes.

He gave birth to a redhead, and a daddy's little girl.

He sent me to the United States before I was 9.

He made me in his own image and taught me entirely too well...and then he arranged my marriage to Yves.

One evening, she logged on to muse about the risks of using false identification in the middle of a terrorist alert. "I'm going to buy a ticket tomorrow and head to my next waypoint if I can."

MAYBE YOU WERE BUSY with war or making a living, but in the last few years the reality-and-illusion crowd has completely colonized the Internet. This isn't as trivial as it might seem. For thousands of years religious fanatics have been telling us that the physical world is an illusion and that we should focus on singing hymns or doing yoga. Now it's postmodern philosophers saying that reality is a matrix filled with invisible forests of signifiers best represented by obscure French and German words. On the Net this translates to a giddy leap into the world of "immersive" games and anonymous transfer protocols that let forty-five-year-old men pretend to be thirteen-year-old girls. Which leaves you and me and the first guy to respond to Isabella's latest cliff-hanger all asking the same question:

Are you halfwits actually buying into this garbage?

Then Isabella posted again, this time a long and convincing description of the spycraft of escape--getting passports, draining bank accounts, hiding liquid assets (particularly some loose diamonds I knew I could sell for local currency), a life reduced to a laptop and a passport. Moving feels safer for some reason. I only really feel secure when I'm on a plane. Then she was in a warm and sunny place, studying books on how to disappear: You have to actually become someone else. You have to be from somewhere. You have to have a history. Habits. Personality. Likes. Dislikes. You have to like cotton candy.

And on she went for another month and more than twenty-four thousand words, about how she found an underground money manager who helped her launder her trusts and came upon a blond man with eerie pale skin trying to force the door of her hotel room and dreamed about the same blond man sniffing her panties and about the long saga of her lonely girlhood at an elite private school and sneaking into her father's ornate library to pore through the stacks of books until the light of the dawn in the window alerted me to the new day and I had to creep up to my room again. She wrote about the erotic allure of death and about cutting herself on purpose to leave something permanent on my body, as if to assert that I actually owned it and could do with it as I pleased. She made references to Milan Kundera and Martin Scorsese and David Lynch and the ordinary people who had school loans, car payments, credit card bills, mortgages, and designer groceries to carry. She drew deft pictures of the strange town where the flat light from overcast skies hurts my eyes or the man blowing on his cappuccino, raising steam that gives the impression that he is surrounded by his own personal microclimate. She teased her readers with hints about dating on the run: SWF, 20-something, flight risk with multiple identities seeks man of few words and fewer questions for semi-formal dating experiment. Risk of sudden disappearance must not be an obstacle.

Whenever the story threatened to bog down, there was fresh adventure--she used an Internet cafÃ© and someone came around claiming to be her cousin, asking questions. I ran and ran as fast as I could until I was completely out of breath. Some of the most plummy writing was about her father and her fear of being committed to a mental institution, the quiet wedding ceremony somewhere after which I'm committed somewhere with pink colored walls and progressive ideas about narcotics therapy. That breaks my big trust wide open and Yves and family take that and the dowry and recapitalize the business. Then there was Alain, who arrived at her parents' house in a motorcade of three sleek, black sedans filled with beautiful and elegant men in beautiful and elegant dark suits and gave her the Montblanc Meisterstück pen that changed her life shortly before he was spectacularly murdered in the heart of Germany that late November day so long ago.

BY THE MIDDLE OF APRIL, when winter was still hanging around like tuberculosis and the war was still going strong, a newsblogger named Sean-Paul Kelley posted a story on agonist.org saying that "a major media outlet" was asking whether Isabella was real and a "former agent from Simon and Schuster" was sniffing around a book deal. Kelley had a spectacular amount of detail, speculating convincingly on who she might be--Paris Hilton? Liesel Pritzker?--and citing three sources: a mysterious security expert who said Isabella was very sophisticated about computer secrecy, a mysterious unnamed "friend of hers" who said he helped Isabella escape, and an unnamed attorney who was so mysterious he would hardly say anything at all. "If she is my client," he said, "I would hardly admit it to the media."

The next day, Kelley posted an update saying that "a source familiar with the family" told them that the family was thought to have hired either Pinkerton or Kroll, "the firm retained to track the assets of the Marcos fortune and Saddam Hussein in 1991." They wanted to handle this quietly.

On shes.aflightrisk.org Isabella responded immediately: The news posted on The Agonist has got me to the point that I'm not going to get a wink of sleep (ever again?). What was confidence has melted into fear. I've been up I know not how long and I dare not go outside.

By this time Isabella's readers had turned detective. Someone named Tibbo jumped on her clue about Alain's murder: Considering the date and the place, the name Alfred Herrhausen comes to mind. Herrhausen was a German banker killed in November 1989, by an extremely sophisticated bomb in one of Germany's most famous crimes. Someone else suggested she was from the v. Finck family or maybe the Thurn und Taxis? and someone named Jen responded: The only thing about the von Fincks that I find intriguing is that one of them is named Isabella v. She's Helmut's daughter and would be in her very early 20s now.

But other readers had softer hearts, like the one who told her to be strong. You still have to go through the whole withdrawal, sorrow, angst, nervousness period. The first couple of years are the toughest. Keep writing. Be careful with valium. You can do this. The next day LG sent a cheerful boost: You write very well for someone who is sleep deprived! And stella attacked the skeptics: Some of the commentators here seem to be totally bereft of even a smidgen of compassion. For Isabella to have taken the risks she has taken, far beyond flight, it is a foregone conclusion that she must have had more than a few not so great reasons to motivate her to do so.

The next day, Kelley posted a remarkable note on agonist.org:

FLIGHT RISK UPDATE

Earlier this week The Agonist received a cease and desist letter from an international law firm representing Isabella's family. For background, Isabella's web log "... shes a flight risk" can be found here. In substance the letter demanded that The Agonist turn over any names or identifying information of sources for the Isabella story as well as remove any related material.

Kelley said he wasn't giving up the names and printed the letter, blacking out the names to protect the anonymity of Isabella and her family. The result looked like something out of an FBI file, all black stripes and threatening boilerplate, as if calculated to enflame the Isabella conspiracy theorists. It has come to our attention that certain unauthorized and libelous disclosures

SOMEDAY THERE WILL BE Internet epidemiologists, and this could be one of the classic case studies on how a mind virus spreads. As May began, someone named darklytr posted a note to a Web site called Collective Detective: Whaddaya think? Fact or fiction? A few of the collective detectives followed the links and came back skeptical, but things were quiet until Isabella jumped in. No, I am not writing a screen play. I have turned down five interview requests. I have been offered three book deals. I have accepted none.

Her arrogant tone hit the skeptics like a rock in a wasps' nest. Let's see, said Cortana. You started a weblog despite the fact that you are a self-proclaimed fugitive and wanting to start over? No better way to do that than to write about ... wait for it ... wait for it ... YOUR PAST! That thing that you want to forget.

In the next phase the virus jumped borders with an article on Wired News by a writer named Leander Kahney with hyperlinks to the dozens of Web logs which by now were debating the reality of Isabella. There were "tantalizing clues" like an "IP address in the Bahamas" and the oddity of Isabella's e-mails--he'd corresponded with her himself, in fact. And there was a New York literary agent named Bob Mecoy who said he was ready to represent Isabella even if she didn't exist: "Though it's a better story if it's true, it doesn't necessarily matter. If it turns out not to be, I'll pitch Isabella as a fiction writer."

THE LIST OF BELIEVERS GREW. Early in May, someone calling himself terr-am-ater posted the results of his research into her domain registration:

AeroBeta, Sociedad Anonima

Apartado Postal 0832-0387

World Trade Center

Panama, Republica de Panama WTC

A few hours later, anonymous coward developed the point. Someone spent several thousand dollars to set up a careful structure. that seems an elaborate effort for a hoax. too many details point away from the hoax theory for my taste. And he decoded the company name:

aero = flight

beta = a financial measure of risk.

AeroBeta, s.a. = flight risk, s.a.

Do a little research, he taunted. It would be interesting to know how much of a link there is between "fiction" theory types and basic laziness.

Then someone calling himself BuddhaG made a pitch for Isabella as a new form of art: You would have been one of those jerks that said Joyce was garbage too probably, until he got read by enough people. Until somebody put it in a nice frame for you. Or that Picasso or Jackson Pollock didn't know how to paint because what they painted didn't look like anything. The way he saw it, the whole Isabella phenomenon could end up saying something about the nature of our perception of truth. It could say something about how we understand and perceive information.

It got ugly after that. Maybe there was nowhere else to go but down. When mistik arrived to say Isabella was real, someone else accused him of being a plant. As it happened, he wasn't the only Isabella defender who was "spoofing"--hijacking someone's e-mail address to send untraceable messages, routing the e-mails through taunting fronts like twomirrorsfacing@mail.com. But mistik came back just as strong. Of course my identity, location, info etc is completely spoofed. I do that as standard practice on the internet. It is irrelevant to the exploration of the Isabella mystery.

BY THIS TIME, I am corresponding with Isabella myself. My first note is: I'm a reporter from Esquire. I'd love to chat by e-mail, ending with: Come on, Isabella. Why not?

This is what I get back:

First off, don't goad me. It is unseemly for a professional and makes me wonder if you don't have an ulterior motive. I'm only responding because I liked your piece "I, Stalkerazzi" and because I'm tired of getting emails from people you have approached for attributable comments asking me "what is his deal?" Second, if you are actually John Richardson of Esquire and you have a legitimate media interest in an interview I will consider it under very strict conditions.

The conditions include calling her attorney in Panama. Mr Ceaser is hard to reach. This is not accidental. If you are interested enough to be persistent you will get a hold of him. If not I have little interest in talking with you. Right off the bat I can tell you that we will require editorial control on the final article.

She's awfully haughty for a person who probably doesn't even exist.

Hi Isabella,

Thanks so much for writing. And I'm thrilled that you liked Stalkerazzi. It's one of my personal favorites. Blah blah blah ... but there's one thing I can't agree to, and that's editorial control of my final article. If you check with your advisors, they'll tell you that no legitimate publication (at least in the United States) lets a subject see a piece before it's printed. It's actually a firing offense, as TK found out in Vanity Fair a few years ago.

But I hit send too fast and have to write a quick follow-up to explain that editors use "TK" for "to come" and I stuck it there because I couldn't remember the name of the Vanity Fair reporter. I'm doing too many things at once. In her next e-mail, she informs me that everything we are writing is off the record and makes fun of my little mistake:

Met with "Isabella" today in the TK climes of TK. She is about TK tall and weighs around TK and her hair is TK. Surprisingly, I have discovered that she is actually Ms. TK and is traveling under the name of TK. She is a woman of TK, TK and TK. I am in the process of finishing out the article based on my interview and should have it done by TK.

I write back.

Don't be so cynical.

Actually, I like that. Mrs. TK.

She could go on a date with Mr. Re.

She writes back.

Better that she marry Mr. O. Then she'd be Mrs. TK-O.

Later she posted an entry on her blog under the title "TK."

SO ISABELLA AND I are collaborating on an interactive fiction. Or is it some kind of immersive game? Maybe all the circuitry humming in the background makes you fall into some kind of digital swoon, but I can't stop myself from musing on the meaning of it all, our religious need to fill the emptiness of the Internet with a more perfect version of ourselves. Or some such nonsense. But it really comes down to this: Isabella is almost certainly some fat-assed Internet loser, and the loser on the other end of the modem is me.

Now it is my goal to charm her. So I tease her about being hypersensitive and she writes me a reply in the middle of the night. I only come off Hypersensitive. I do seem much more abrasive in email than in person I am told. Then she demands "editorial control" again and brings up the embedded reporters in Iraq and bristles when I promise to be fair. That's a subjective and bullshit term bandied about by media types to mean whatever suits them that day. Don't feed me that line. It's not going to be fair if I get caught. In fact, unless I state in my next e-mail that all discussions so far and in the future were in fact off the record, then it will be the last you hear from me and I will group you in the "slimy reporters" bin.

After cooling down, I make another attempt to break through. It's late. I'm tired. It's been a rough week. I got illness in the family and relationship issues and you're driving me crazy. Would it kill you to be just a tiny bit more cooperative? Okay, maybe that wasn't the best phrasing. She writes back and says she's sorry I'm having a hard time but it's tough all over and this is my last chance. I am running potentially for my life. I'm not having a real good time either.

Finally I just give in. Okay, to hell with it--these negotiatons are off the record. Let's move to the next level. But I don't want to be another phony in a phony world so I also tell her I am feeling very uncomfortable. I know that many clever people think there is no truth and therefore nothing to trust. But I do not believe this. I find it glib and sophomoric. So let me be perfectly clear--if this is a spoof and you are negotiating in bad faith, I won't feel bound by this agreement or any other.

I BEGIN AUTODIALING PANAMA, talking in muy malo español to a very impatient receptionist. After about a week I finally reach Mr. Carlos Ceaser. Yes, he says, although he advised against it, Isabella is willing to do interviews under certain strict limitations. If I would e-mail him a list of questions, he would respond with a list of their requirements.

Then I don't hear from either one of them for a week. When I get through to Ceaser again, he says he's waiting for instructions.

Another week. Then she writes me again, apologizing, saying she's been going through a hard time. Swinging for the fences, trying to work the game on all levels and be honest at the same time, I tell her a wild story that happens to be true: A couple of weeks ago, I met this girl on the internet. She had read my last book, which is about dwarfs and has a lot of stuff in it about body image and beauty. So we started talking about families and difference and stuff and little by little we became more personal and intimate, as one does on the internet. And after a while I wanted to see what she looked like. But she wasn't comfortable with it. She wanted to have a relationship without looks involved. I began to think that maybe she was a dwarf herself and maybe she was fucking with me as some kind of dwarf revenge. One day she mentioned her picture appearing in a newspaper so I did a search and turned up the article and called the paper and had them mail it to me. But here's the thing--in the week it took to arrive, I became so close to this invisible woman that when the envelope came, my heart started to pound. I wasn't sure I wanted to open it and kill the fantasy. And it felt like I was violating her trust, her expressed request not to involve our physical persons. On the other hand, I didn't want to develop feelings for some pretend person. I like bodies. I like the physical world. I'm not into fantasy novels or fantasy movies or religious fairy stories either. So the envelope sat there on my desk all day. At ten that night, I called her and asked if she was ready to send me a picture. She said she was. So I told her about the envelope. She felt violated at first but calmed down when I pointed out that I hadn't opened it. And finally she told me to open it. And I ripped it open and looked at her face for the first time.

I want to talk to you on the phone.

In response, Isabella gives me Bob Mecoy's phone number and says he's acting as her literary agent. And minutes later I'm speaking to an actual real person. But minutes after that it becomes clear that Mecoy has never actually spoken to Isabella, only communicated with her by e-mail. He's hoping I'll find out the truth. "Like you, I want to press the flesh," he says. "I wanna see the high school yearbook."

Another week goes by. Then another. Finally Mecoy calls. "What are you doing the nineteenth?"

Meeting Isabella?

She's agreed to my compromise on editorial review, correcting the transcript of our interview instead of the story itself. Her security will be contacting me by phone. I'll fly to a major airport and get instructions to drive to a secure location where heavily armed security will meet me, strip-search me, and take me by small plane or car to a more secure location. No recording devices or cameras and after a two-hour interview I will have to remain in place until a "distance barrier" is established.

I send my editor an e-mail: I'm starting to believe. But it still could be the wild goose chase of all time.

Later Mecoy follows up with a memo repeating all the points above, ending with a flourish that's pure Isabella: Please be aware that this interview is expensive (these security measures are costing her in excess of $20,000), risky and inconvenient. She is accepting your assurances that this is a serious interview and will be quite upset if you are, as she says, "playing games."

I WROTE A STORY about a con "artist" once, a scumbag who made $90 million selling shares in the life-insurance policies of terminally ill patients who existed only in his imagination. He sued me on his way to being indicted. One thing I learned from that lovely experience is that hustlers always accuse you of conning them. It's a way of getting you off-balance. And maybe on some level they believe it and use it to justify all the nasty things they do. So I've never been amused by the thin line between reality and illusion and never really got why artists and philosophers think it's so damn interesting. It's annoying. Getting things right is hard work. You have to stop clicking and cutting and get out the yellow marker. Because rational thought is sequential, like Marshall McLuhan said. And now that I'm running my e-mails through an encryption technology called Hushmail, the runaway heiress is giving answers that must be studied:

My mother hasn't been much the subject of my writings because she was always on my side. I haven't wanted to subject her to dark scrutiny. She's just a woman in the last vestige of truly male dominated enclaves. My father openly has mistresses, etc. She enjoys her role in many ways as a power wife and a charity socialite, but she always wanted a bit more. She talks about childhood among the superrich, the huge hall at home, with portraits of all our relatives going back to like 1120. My Great-great-great-whatever Uncle's suit of armor he fought in the Crusades with is on display. She describes in detail the point when it began to dawn on her that the money and the cars and the planes weren't freedom but a method of control. Didn't like how I was behaving? Take away access to the jet. Not riding enough dressage? Turn off the cash spigot. Instant contrite and proper daughter.

But I just can't connect with her. In other Internet relationships I've learned that you have to fill in for all the missing physical cues with glimpses of your daily life and emotional reactions, so I mention that I was also raised by servants and sent to an elite private school, things you might think a lonely person on the run might use to start a personal conversation. But Isabella stays cool and professional. Periodically she copies our e-mail strings to Mecoy.

And she never writes on weekends.

ON JULY 9, I open my Hushmail account and find this:

Make plans for a flight to:

Las Vegas

El Paso

Seattle

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Well, this is progress. Maybe I was wrong, maybe she just seemed cold because she was a reserved person, like Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark. My office puts holds on tickets for all four places, and more and more I begin to believe in her, if only because it would seem rude to be talking to someone and not believe in them a little.

I was pretty introverted as a girl. I read a lot. I hatched grand conspiracies. That sort of thing.

... I don't have ALL that much respect for my brothers. I don't really have any clue what they "want" other than to spend money and sleep with women. Very aristo.

... For years I had an American Express platinum card that some guy with a green eyeshade in a basement somewhere just paid the bill for. I never even knew how much I had put on it. It always seemed to get paid regardless. (I tried to find the ceiling once, and failed.) I think I had refused to come home or something when I was like 17 or 18 and suddenly the card was turned off. I was stranded in Scandinavia and had to call home to get back--and then was forced to attend the social event I had been avoiding. That was alarming.

... If "Alain" could be gotten to, so could anyone. My father had upset quite a lot of people with his corporate and banking endeavors. (He was on both the Arab and the Jewish blacklists at the same time at one point.)

... I spent a lot of time sneaking into night clubs, trying to be more exposed to "teen socialization" and the rituals thereof. I was really far too cold, too reserved to be a very good girlfriend, I expect. I suppose I might have been considered good "fling" material. If you liked the elven look then you probably found me attractive. Charlie Brown's "Little Redheaded Girl." "That's the rich girl ... with the red hair. Her dad owns jets."

... I had spent all this time in High School and beyond going wherever I pleased, doing whatever I wanted. Traveling to France in the middle of the school year. That sort of thing. No one seemed even vaguely interested until later. Instead of gaining independence with the arrival of 20-something I was losing it.

... You don't send your kid to the center of the free world, take a two decade long hands-off approach to child rearing, allow them to make associations, friends, and become culturally attuned to that place during their most formative years, open a financial spigot so large that it would be impossible to drink from it without spilling, express nearly no interest in the choices and travels of this child and then, suddenly, reverse yourself when they are at their most independent and expect to be able to exert unopposed control--that is, unless you are my father.

... My mother has done a brilliant job of finding her path through this noise. She does it primarily by realizing and cultivating her access to my father and his aides. Though she is a European wife, no aide would dare tell her "no" to anything. And she holds considerable sway over my father. She is often a soft voice. She tends to breathe warmth into his actions--which would otherwise seem cold and sterile. Most importantly, she understands him. I think she is quite satisfied to play this role. I used to catch her smiling to herself when she had persuaded him to do something he was otherwise uninclined to. Her view, I'm sure, was that I could become like her. The power behind the scenes. "Who could you ever marry that you would not lead by the nose with a string...." she asked me once.

... My sex life is mostly uninteresting. I've only had 3 serious relationships, by serious I mean with a sexual component. I think what you mean is that Yves was/is an attempt to get my sexual exploits "back in line" with expectations. Unfortunately, I never had enough to be "out of line" with expectations. There was one incident where a smitten boy stalked me (back before stalking was a big deal) and had a decidedly unpleasant run in with security people. (Spent the night in jail with a broken nose when he mouthed off to one I guess.)

... I was just stunned by the credit card thing. At first it was played off like there was a problem of some kind but if I came home it would all be fixed. It was only later that I found out it was by design.

...-How did I react? I spent a lot of time quietly thinking about it. Planning. I realized that every place I went, every dollar I spent was being watched. I started using more cash, being more careful. The more careful I was the more I realized the depth of control my father had. The more I realized how much I had been giving away. I stopped giving it away.

... Live your whole life with infinite freedom, so free you are constantly bored because there is no challenge in life. None. Want something? Make a phone call. Don't like it? Hand it back, another one appears. Curious what Lynda is doing in Nice? Get on the Concorde to Paris and fly to Nice that afternoon. Slowly discover that there might be some challenges for you in the corporate world. That, indeed, money is not the only reward there. (Indeed, it better not be, because I had more of that than I knew what to do with.) Start exploring your options, slowly, carefully. Get excited for the first time in a long while. Then, suddenly, have it taken away and a very obvious prison put in its place.

AT 2:32 ON THE afternoon of July 14, my phone rings and a man's voice comes on, crackling with cell static and sounding vaguely official. He says he's on Isabella's security team and I can call him David. "I'm trying to understand why a face-to-face meeting is to her advantage, and frankly I'm having a hard time." But he tells me to be ready to go to Las Vegas or San Juan. He'll give me twenty-four hours notice. "Expect brutal sun," he says.

Then the deadline arrives and I still haven't heard from them. I send her an e-mail:

Well, Isabella ... it's time. What's going on?

FRIDAY MORNING David calls again. "The location will be Las Vegas. Rent a car and e-mail a description of the car and the hotel and wait for further instructions."

A few minutes later, he calls back to ask if I have a valid passport.

Then I call the travel agent and book the ticket, the hotel, the car.

He calls again at six. The meeting is going to be pushed forward a day--or canceled. I tell him my ticket is nonrefundable. "Should I get on the plane or not?"

I would wait, he says.

THAT NIGHT, MECOY gets a message encrypted through an anonymizer in Liechtenstein. It came from a guy he's written to before, supposedly a friend of Isabella's. "He said she and her security people have been separated," he tells me the next morning, "and they believe she's been snatched."

Snatched? You've got to be kidding me.

That was his reaction, too, he tells me. So he shot an e-mail right back at the guy asking Who are you? and Who is she? and What is going on?! And then the phone rang and it was the guy and he said someone from the security team called him in the middle of the night asking if he knew where she was. They couldn't find her and they thought she'd been snatched. But he always told her to build some sort of "dead-man trigger," some envelope to the authorities or message that would pop up on her Web site within forty-eight hours of her abduction. Later the mystery man calls again and says the reason nobody called to cancel my meeting is because they felt it was too much of a coincidence--"They're setting up a meeting with you and she gets taken."

What? Some security service tapped the phone of a reporter? Listened twenty-four hours a day to my boring conversations so they could track down a blogging heiress? It's ridiculous.

"I may have had my fly unzipped," Mecoy says, sounding a little embarrassed.

A few days later I tell the whole crazy saga to an ex--Navy Seal who protects presidents and he cuts me off after about two minutes. "I don't even have to think about it--it's 100 percent fucking con."

Then David calls again. But I've given up on her. Game over. He says he wants to explain. There was an attempt to "repatri- ate her." There was gunfire. Will I meet him in San Francisco? He promises to have some kind of proof that will make it all worthwhile--but of course he can't tell me on the phone.

So here I am in California, sitting like a putz next to the phone. The hotel TV says another kid just got blown up in Iraq and I turn it off. Maybe it's time to reconsider this whole journalism deal, this business of letting things happen and taking notes. It makes you feel like an eternal ten-year-old, waiting for Dad to honk the car horn.

Then the phone rings. "The meeting is on," David says. "I'll call you again at 5:45 and give you details."

"Where is it going to be?"

"I'll tell you at 5:45."

Just after 5:30, the phone rings again. "Can you be at the Ritz-Carlton at 5:45?"

"I don't know. Where's the Ritz-Carlton?"

"Two blocks away."

"Then I can be there."

"Go to the reception desk and tell them you have a meeting with Mr. Smith."

Sure, fine. And if the Ritz-Carlton clerk doesn't give me a blank stare, he'll point me to some dandruff-trailing geek at the bar who will tell me that it was all just a "fiction" just before I punch him in the nose. But I stuff a tape recorder and a camera into my backpack and walk down California Street.

And there's the Ritz. Damn, it's a palace. The doormen are wearing black top hats. The lobby has that muffled-by-money hush. And when I mention Mr. Smith, the clerk blooms into a warm smile. "Hello, Mr. Richardson," she says, and waves over a bellman who guides me to what seems like a private elevator bank and slides a magnetic card into a slot, pressing the number for the top floor. "Will you be all right or would you like to be escorted?"

"I'll be all right."

Up I go and out the door and down the hall to the very end. The carpet is thick, the door solid.

Knock-knock.

"When I open the door," a male voice says, "wait for a count of five and then enter."

After a moment someone unlatches the door and leaves it propped open on the brass tongue. But I forget my instructions. "Am I going to count to five or are you going to count to five?"

No answer. So one two three four five and push open the door....

I have plenty of time to take in my surroundings, to note the single white orchid on the coffee table and the Dell laptop open on the desk. The bed in the other room is rumpled. And there's a man with a very big gun--a black assault rifle that looks very modern and high-tech. He's pointing it at the floor at a curious angle and my mind goes into one of those dreamlike blurs that take over when you get into an accident or a fight.

The man throws something metal at my feet. In a soothing and courteous voice, he says they're handcuffs and he's very sorry but he's going to have to ask me to put them on. It's procedure.

I look down and it's like a shot in a movie: CLOSE-UP on police cuffs. They shine like mercury. They look heavy. "That's not going to happen," I say.

"Then you'll have to sit down and let me search you."

"Fine. No problem. Search away."

He's strikingly handsome and very well dressed--dark suit, fancy loafers, French cuffs. Some kind of ethnic blood gave him brown skin and Elvis-black hair, Filipino maybe. "You're David?"

He nods. "Obviously that's not my real name." Then he tells me to empty my backpack of all tape recorders, cameras, pens, and other metal objects. I can use one pen to write but best not make any sudden movements. Then he mutters into his earpiece microphone and takes a stance in the doorway to the bedroom with his weapon pointing diagonally at the floor.

"What kind of a gun is that?"

"A Bushmaster AR-15."

A minute or two passes and then the door opens behind me. David holds his stance. I twist in my chair to see.

Close to the root of faith, there is a longing for the blissful mindless days before we ate of the fruit of knowledge and saw that we were naked and were ashamed. On the other side are the modernists and perverts who say we should take ambiguity as a challenge and invent the future as we go along. But both sides agree with this: The minute we put names to things, we stepped into a symbolic world where nothing would ever be fixed and solid--where we are haunted by words, the ghosts of real things.

Reading this story, you're still in that symbolic world. But I'm not. I've stepped through the looking glass. This is real.

She's thin and pale, with significant hollows scalloped under her eyes and fine hair that orangey color you get when you try to go blond but don't quite make it. About five-seven, slender, and elegant in black heels and black pants and a white top. Isabella sits in the armchair at the other end of the coffee table.

"Are you surprised?"

Hell yes, I'm surprised. But it still feels like I'm gliding on magnetic rails. Could be an actress. A hunk with a carbine. Directed by Michael Mann.

She gives me a nervous smile, tells me to ask questions, but I just don't know what to say. How you doing? Seen any good movies lately? Have you noticed that guy standing there with that gigantic fucking gun? Finally I just blurt out the last thought to rattle across my brainpan, that she looks tired, and she says she was shot at so yes she's tired and scared too. So I ask why her father would have someone shoot at her and she says it's all a bit confusing, maybe it wasn't her father at all, just some random thing. Then she looks up at David and he says he's sorry but all they can really say at this time is that two bullets hit the car, one whizzing through the air in front of her and the other passing through the seat cushion under her legs.

"It just seems insane," I say.

"It is insane," she answers. "But I wouldn't put anything past my father."

Then she tells me about being on the run and always having security around and having to plan each move and feeling like she's traded one prison for the next. Half of the wild loops on my pad won't make any sense later. But slowly she starts to make sense. When she says it's exciting to defy her father, the light flashes in her eyes. I'm getting more used to her rhythms, from girlish hesitation to aloof poise to these sudden sunbursts of energy. Emotions move quickly across her face but she's restrained, an attractive quality. She's nervous and also a little imperious. And she's actually quite fine and beautiful. So maybe she still doesn't have good answers for all my questions--the reason she doesn't just hold a press conference is because she still feels some family loyalty despite the arranged marriage and relentless hunt and possible murder attempt--but now all the lousy answers seem to fit together. "I'm thinking the Web log was a mistake," she says. "It seemed like a release, an outlet, a kind of a game...."

She stops and grins. "But I've grown to like it a lot. It's drawn quite an audience. It puts me out there, but it's safe. It's disguised."

"Do you ever think your parents might read it?"

"I've fantasized about that--look what I've done!"

And it lights up her face. And suddenly I like her and I want to help her. What exactly does she want from me? What am I doing here?

"I want people to believe that I'm real," she says. Then she gives a little laugh. "I've felt a little unreal--like a ghost. It feels a little narcissistic, to put myself out there--but I want to."

How much time had gone by? Half an hour? An hour? I can't tell you. That Dell laptop on the desk must be the Latitude C400 she mentions in her blog, the one that runs Debian and uses AirSnort. Hold that up to the suits of armor and the seventeen centuries of sinister momentum and it all makes sense. It's a modern story and she's a modern girl trapped between the past and the future, trying to break out for a little run of freedom. And the Internet dream state is not just a vast slump of losers dreaming away in their pods; it's the digital confessional, where people drop their guard and explore their fantasies and make swift and deep connections in the anarcho-syndicalist hive where we are dreaming the future. And Isabella's talking about hiding in the shadows and trying to look bored and never knowing how much she can tell people--or say, a guy--when suddenly she stops. "I'm close to tears right now. I haven't talked to anyone except security for so long, I don't know what I can say anymore."

"Do you want a moment to compose yourself?" David asks.

She says she does and walks past him to the bathroom. This has the feeling of something rehearsed. He holds his stance but says he's sorry for misleading me with the thing about getting snatched, and I realize that it is getting very hot and stuffy in this room. Doubtless air conditioning would interfere with their sophisticated counterspy gadgets.

A minute later she comes back. "I'm more composed now," she says with a nervous laugh.

We talk for another hour or so. Sometimes she looks to David, who responds in a soothing and measured voice somewhere between Secret Service man and camp counselor. Several times she says she's feeling more relaxed, and once when David interrupts to tell her to be careful, she teases him. "David is more controlling than my father was."

"But better looking," I say.

She laughs. "He doesn't like it when I flirt with him, and he doesn't have a sense of humor." She looks down her nose at the Bushmaster. "I want to know if that thing is really necessary--that's what you should ask him."

David acts somber. "If I shoot them, I want them to go down the first time."

We are playing parts, of course. She's bringing a touch of Audrey Hepburn to the whole girl-in-jeopardy thing, David's doing some kinda Gary Cooper G-man, and I'm the barefoot reporter oozing human sympathy like a slug. Some of it is true and some we're laying on just to keep things coherent, adding yet another layer of confusion to this modern dilemma of identity.

Which brings us to Yves, her bridegroom. They grew up together, she says. She even had a crush on him. And then one night out of the blue her family and his family went to dinner and the two fathers started talking about a trust fund and a dowry and at first she thought they were talking about some other couple--and then it hit her. And then it hit Yves. "He got up and walked away, and I started crying. There I was, rejected already even before I was a bride. He did not want it at all. And it was very clear that I would only be the wife, never the lover, never the desired--and I will only marry for love."

She'll never understand why her father was not "amenable to argument." It wasn't like the families were a particularly good business match or anything. She couldn't figure it out. She almost felt something was being kept from her. And even now she sometimes thinks she's just acting like a spoiled rich girl and if Yves hadn't bolted from the table maybe she would have tried to make it work--but why would her father want to marry her to a guy who was going to treat her like shit for fifty years?

"Careful," David says.

But the subject makes her emotional, turning her mind to all the things she has lost. "I felt at home at home," she says. "I knew my position. I knew who I was. I knew what I wanted."

A bit later, she stops. "I actually feel very exposed right now."

A few minutes after that, she ends the interview.

I sit and scribble. David holds his stance in the bedroom doorway and talks on his earset. "Extract One ... all right, sounds good ... clear One." Then he heaves a big sigh and unslings the Bushmaster AR-15 and opens his jacket and pours himself a glass of Pellegrino from the big green bottle on the table. It's hard work holding a gun like that on your feet for two solid hours. Relaxing, working the muscles in his shoulders, he tells me he got his start "some years ago" in counternarcotics work somewhere in Latin America and researched this carefully before getting involved. What tipped it was her family, how ruthless they were. That's not how families are supposed to behave. In the first few months on the run, they found a bug at least once and had to blow town a couple of times when the searchers got too close. They "chronically underestimated" the search effort. Fortunately Isabella had resources of her own--tens of millions, which was good because the team was expensive and they couldn't fly commercial anymore. This trip alone cost $75,000. Eventually they would have to find a way to stabilize the situation.

He wants me to know that Isabella is fragile. She has nightmares, lots of stuff about being chased and not being able to run fast enough. She probably couldn't survive without money. She doesn't know how to have relationships, to flirt and be normal. But she is not a bird you can keep in a cage. Even after her blog cost her two lawyers, she still kept publishing the damn thing. And being her security man was no picnic either. "She's this postadolescent redhead," he says with a meaningful shrug. "It gets tough."

At this point I notice the lovely cuff links with pale-blue oval stones. He's wearing Zegna, Zanella, and Gucci loafers. The eurotexture shirt is particularly stylish. "How do I know you're not just her boyfriend posing with a gun and there's just the two of you and no security team at all?"

He smiles like this is the most ridiculous thing I've said yet, and pops a bullet out of the chamber of his rifle. "Want a souvenir?" he asks. It's a .223 fifty-five-grain full metal jacket, about two inches long.

As I walk out through the hushed lobby a moment later, the friendly clerk says, "Goodbye, Mr. Richardson." It's dark out now and chilled by a fog so thick it makes my face wet. Later the doubts will come back--an assault rifle at the Ritz-Carlton? Who really wrote that threatening letter to agonist.org? Couldn't a big-time lawyer solve all this with one phone call? In a week I'll ask her to let me call her parents for comment, setting off an ugly episode of suspicion and hostility. But that all comes when I step back out of my body and get back to the world of symbols, safe at my computer, and it will never feel as true and alive as this moment right now, walking through the misty chilled streets with the city lights turning the fog gold. I was wrong to be so cynical. Sometimes you really do make a connection and rise to the level of your dreams.

Isabella is real.

I think.

She still writes to me, telling me about landing strips in the middle of nowhere and sitting in a charming open-air room on an island known for its beaches. She talks about melting into the world and the wonderful moment when the rain breaks. I check my Hushmail account every day.

There's my plane, she says today. Gotta go.

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