Distorted

Once a kind of bare trust is established, she will, like a good con artist, push her mark away, refusing him, telling him he's not worth her time. Then he will come right back, often with surprising offerings of information to prove that he is the real thing. "If they could see me, little blond me, they'd go crazy," she says in a burst of hearty laughter.

Much of Rossmiller's success can be credited to her understanding that the chattiness and chumminess that often cinches digital friendships applies in terrorist chat rooms just as it does in Yahoo Nascar forums. This skill was on display when she struck up an online correspondence with a jihadist in the Middle East named "Hakim" (for Rossmiller's protection, his name has been changed).

On this mission, Rossmiller assumed the identity of a particularly murderous terrorist known as Abu Musa. She befriended Hakim, who lived in a country bordering Iraq and was looking to travel there, possibly for martyrdom, with 10 other people. The talk quickly turned to personal travails, and soon Hakim was complaining about the biggest obstacle to his desired glory as a martyr: his mother. Hakim, it turned out, lived alone with her, and, because of that, was having trouble finding the time to go fight in Iraq. "I am trying to send her to live with a brother of mine who lives in a country close by," he wrote, "if Allah will." (The cliché of the reactionary blogger as angry vigilante plotting schemes from his mother's basement appears to be universal.)

Hakim seemed to be a big fan of orotund flourishes, and Rossmiller happily indulged him. "Brother in Allah... I still pray to Allah that my message arrives to you and you are in the more perfect of the health and the good health and protected from the eyes of the spies and polytheists and the cross slaves," she wrote him in Arabic. Hakim also happily filled out the bayat form, giving Rossmiller all his real data, including address and phone numbers.

As usual, Rossmiller, aka Abu Musa, bragged about participating in events at which her presence couldn't easily be corroborated (such as fighting in Fallujah a few weeks before). But then Abu Musa made a mistake: He told Hakim he was located in a village that turned out to be just a cab ride away from Hakim, who then wanted to visit. Rossmiller had already alerted her contact in the federal government about Hakim. Now, this contact explained, he needed her to play for time while he contacted local authorities. Suddenly Abu Musa found himself summoned to Syria for an important mission.

When Abu Musa returned after a week, Hakim was briefly suspicious but then returned to being chatty and revved up for jihad. Abu Musa had ordered him to create a new email account and a new password so they could be safe. "And he's a good boy," Rossmiller says. "Here, he's made an email account. I love the password. 123456." Soon, Hakim is comfortable enough to tell Abu Musa that he and his friends are ready to go to Iraq and that he needs some ingredients for a bomb .

This email is amazingly long, detailed, revealing, and inadvertently funny. Sure, he'd need "1000 sulfur Match sticks," potassium nitrate, acetone, glycerin, and potassium permanganate. But he also wanted a food processor, a fan, a hair dryer, two cell phones, a remote control, a knife, and Scotch tape. Abu Musa agrees to send a contact to meet in the public area of an upscale neighborhood, and Hakim gives specific details as to his dress and appearance. Hakim is hopeful, praying for "Allah's mercy and its blessings and pray to Allah that it keeps us and protects us from the cunning of the enemies." And then, his last words: "We meet on our date God willing."

"All I know," Rossmiller says, "is that he showed up, and it played out to script." He led his new contact to a warehouse where the other brothers were training. The local authorities took over from there.

Rossmiller jokes that she's needed to become twisted herself to deal with all the beheading videos she's had to watch. But after a few days of hanging around her, it's clear that she's not in the least bit abnormal. Her gallows humor is just a way of dealing with the world she lives in. (Imagine the kind of jokes you'd have to tell yourself if the hookers and chop-shop thugs in your Grand Theft Auto game were real.) In fact, her main motivation seems to be literary. She really loves creating these characters and playing them. She cares for them on some level, the way a novelist might. She keeps files on them. She clips pictures off the Internet to give them faces. She gives each a birthday, a hometown, and a biography to make them believable to the people she chats with.

"Do you want to see Abu Musa?" she asks me suddenly, as if he were hiding in the closet. She clicks on some files and up comes a picture of a fairly dashing man with a pair of hip glasses and one of those jaw-defining beards. He's wearing a fashionable kafia around his neck, and his posture is catalog-ready. Of course, Abu Musa is his jihadi name. His "real" name is Walid Ali Mustaffa.

She scrolls through his biography. On December 17, 2003, Abu Musa was involved in a truck explosion that killed nearly 30 people outside the Mount Lebannon Hotel in Baghdad.

"Those are real events," says Rossmiller, who has, of course, extensively researched the explosion. "He could have been involved in that."

Not long after his interactions with Hakim, Abu Musa was martyred by Rossmiller. "Abu Musa had been used enough," she says, pointing at the screen. "Here's the last one," she says. "An insurgent gun battle in Ramadi. August 21, 2005. That's when he dies." Rossmiller is serious, almost solemn. "I have a hard time letting go of these guys, because I kinda become them. When you develop a personality, you essentially morph into it. It's hard to let it go. He's the one I cried the most for."