In hiding, facing imminent arrest in Peru, the world famous ex-spy chief reportedly sent a cryptic message Friday asking for the safety of house arrest if he were to turn himself in. This comes after the Peruvian government announced last week that it would launch a probe into allegations that Montesinos laundered more than $48 million through Swiss banks, and that he could face prosecution on illicit enrichment charges.

Just over a month ago Montesinos, the former head of Peru's National Intelligence Service (SIN), notorious for repeated human rights abuses, fled his country after videotapes surfaced showing him bribing an opposition legislator to change sides in favor of his boss, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.

When Montesinos took the step taken by so many other fallen villains before him -- taking off for Panama in a private jet -- he expected the same reception they had been given. But Panama's president, Mireya Moscoso, refused him asylum on Oct. 22 -- the first time in Panamanian history that the country refused to serve as the "trash bin for other nation's cast-off leaders," in the words of Miguel Antonio Bernal, a law professor and leader of a popular movement that mobilized to pressure the government into denying Montesinos sanctuary.

And that was just the beginning. When he arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that evening on what he thought was a secret flight back to Peru, he was met instead by a blizzard of television cameras and the flashbulbs of news photographers. The press had been tipped off by a man who had gained the upper hand in an extraordinary rivalry. Latin America's most notorious spymaster had been handed a humiliating defeat by one of Peru's leading investigative journalists, Gustavo Gorriti.

The world has learned of Montesinos' brutal reign over Peruvian politics only recently. But for more than a decade Gorriti was chronicling his corrupt rise to power, and the human rights abuses committed by his security forces, in the Peruvian newsmagazine Caretas. Eventually he fled the country after death threats were isued against himself, his wife and his young daughter.

The tale of these two men, who grew up in the same neighborhood in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, now has the makings of a magical realist tale. Their personal rivalry has played a central role in kicking off the tragi-comic soap opera that accompanied Montesinos' return to Peru. For when Montesinos made his frantic exit from Peru on Sept. 26 and landed in Panama City, he arrived, like a figure from a Mario Vargas Llosa novel, in the very country to which he had forced his journalistic nemesis into exile.

Montesinos would soon discover that Gorriti had not faded into the obscurity of exile. Since arriving in Panama City in 1996 -- after stints as a Neiman fellow at Harvard and with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, as well as writing for the New York Times and the New Republic -- he has been associate director of Panama's leading newspaper, La Prensa. During his tenure in Panama, he has inspired dramatic improvements in the nation's journalistic culture, leading La Prensa investigations into money laundering, arms dealing and corruption.

In 1997, Panama's then-President Ernesto Balladares attempted to have Gorriti deported after a series of embarrassing exposés. That effort was derailed after the newspaper's staff defied efforts by the police to oust him from La Prensa's office -- they created a round-the-clock phalanx of support, with Gorriti barricaded inside -- and protests flooded in from journalists around the world.

Gorriti's fury at Fujimori and Montesino's increasingly authoritarian rule led him to take a three month leave from La Prensa last spring to advise the opposition candidate, Alejandro Toledo, whose accusations of fraud in the presidential election helped spark the current crisis in Peru.

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