For 17 months, they tracked one another’s movements like prey.

But Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton came together here on Thursday evening to pull off a secret rendezvous. They ditched their traveling entourages, eluded camera crews across town and startled many of their own advisers as they held their first private meeting since becoming archrivals for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It was a political scavenger hunt like this capital had seldom seen before — at least in the current frenzied climate — where the two rivals huddled at an undisclosed location. Only hours earlier, she sought to cool speculation that she was clamouring to be his running mate, but suddenly the city’s media was awash in rumor as word spread of their meeting.

The evening began in routine fashion, with Obama holding a large rally in northern Virginia. Then, he was scheduled to travel by motorcade to Dulles International Airport and fly to Chicago. The motorcade arrived, but Obama did not, stirring alarm among reporters who had been aboard the campaign plane for 45 minutes as it sat on the tarmac.

Shortly before takeoff, one part of the secret was divulged. Robert Gibbs, the campaign’s communications director, said Obama would not be flying to Chicago as previously scheduled. He gave no reason for this mysterious pronouncement and there was little time for questions, considering that the engines had started to whir.

Sunlen Miller, who covers the Obama campaign for ABC News, filed an urgent dispatch via Blackberry to report that the senator had abruptly changed plans and had given the slip to those who were traveling with him all day. “I sent it as the wheels were going up,” Miller said of her message, recounting the agitation and confusion among her fellow travelers as the 757 lifted off.

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