Page 26 of The Oligarch's Daughter

17

He warmed himself by the fire for a good half hour. Then it was time to move, to find someplace to crash for a few hours at least. He smothered the fire and laid down the flaps of earth to conceal any traces of it.

And he thought about how he’d gotten to this point.

One lunch hour, a little over five years ago, he’d walked to the Strand in Manhattan, the bookstore that advertises “eighteen miles of books.” He found the right section, pulled out several paperbacks with titles likeHow to Change Your IdentityandHow to Disappear ForeverandHow to Disappear and Never Be FoundandHow to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish Without a Trace.

He studied the books. At the East Fifty-Eighth Street branch of the New York Public Library, he spent a couple of lunch hours using a computer. He found some interesting websites that offered help on what was called “starting from scratch.” Disappearing and starting a new life under a new name, a new identity.

It was a lot.

Apparently, thousands of people tried to disappear each year. There are all kinds of reasons for people to seek to start over. Your debts pile up. Your marriage is a disaster. You’re an embezzler. Or you’re a bail jumper, a Ponzi schemer, an insurance scammer. Or you’re trying to escape a stalker.

But it wasn’t so easy anymore. Paul had once read a great old thriller,The Day of the Jackal, in which a professional assassin goes into a graveyard, copies down the name of someone who died as an infant, gets a birth certificate under that name, and is on his way. No longer possible. Not since 9/11.

Now, in the internet era, there were all sorts of problems with trying to disappear. Facial recognition, in the form of CCTV cameras, was all over cities and towns in the United States. You really couldn’t go to a big city to hide, as you might have done in the pre-internet old days. Now, everywhere you went, you left behind digital breadcrumbs: IP addresses, social media, electronic bank transactions, traces of your mobile phone.

The question was, how could he get a new identity? He needed a new Social Security number, that was the thing. It always came down to that. But how to get one?

According to the spy novels he’d read and TV shows and movies he’d seen, the best way to disappear was to fake your own death. “Burnt beyond recognition” in a car wreck or something like that.

But, in reality, faking your death—even assuming he could pull it off—turned out to be a very bad idea, according to his research. It was the best way to attract a lot of unwanted law enforcement and media attention. Or so the books he’d read had told him.

Whereas, if you just disappeared, the only person looking for you would be whoever you were running from.

So he hadn’t faked his death. But he had created a new identity. Moved to a new place where he could disappear into woodworking. But that took considerable preparation. To create a false identity, and make it your own, the books said, you had to build it piece by piece.

First was the decision about where to move. It had to be within the United States, because he didn’t have a passport in another name. And he’d need to go to a small town, one where he was unlikely to run into anyone from his past life. Not to a resort or anywhere that had a lot of tourists visiting. He loved boats and the water, but that was known, so, not to a town on the ocean. Just not too far from the water, either.

He chose New Hampshire because he had no known connections to it. He’d driven through the state several times as a kid and had enjoyed the skiing—though, later, he found that the skiing was a lot better in Colorado or Utah. He wanted a place that was as opposite to New York City as you could get. A small town but not too small. Somewhere he could plausibly move to without attracting too much attention. Somewhere he could get a job that would pay him off the books. That was crucial. Something involving boats would be appealing.

A combination of a Google search—again, always on a computer at the public library—and a real estate web search targeted the town of Derryfield, New Hampshire. Population: 1,602.

It seemed the perfect place to hide.

18

After a mere five minutes of walking, his feet tingling with little starbursts of pain, he came upon a boulder field. A pile of giant boulders, one on top of another, formed a cleft between them that was a sort of cave. He peered into this space to make sure it wasn’t already a home to, say, a porcupine. Animals loved caves. This one seemed to be unoccupied. But it was too shallow to serve as shelter, maybe four feet long by a few feet wide.

The old skills were starting to come back now. He looked around for something that could serve as a pole and found a long dead tree branch that was perfect. When leaned against a ridge in the top boulder, it made an excellent tent pole. Over the next ten minutes, he dragged smaller dead tree branches and limbs to the site and leaned them against the tent pole. As the sky grew deep orange and the sun dipped below the horizon, he created a rudimentary tent whose porous walls were made of sticks and branches and dead leaves and pine boughs. A sort of wolf’s den. He then laid down pine boughs as a kind of bed, but mostly as insulation from the cold ground.

He clambered inside. He had no sleeping bag—a sleeping bag is a body bag, his father used to say, meaning that a sleeping bag would trap you, immobilize your arms, if someone or something came after you.A sleeping bag is a bear’s taco. Instead, he’d brought along what Stan Brightman called a ranger roll: a fleece blanket rolled up with a poncho, a poncho liner, and a tarpaulin. He laid down the poncho liner to use as ground cover and then covered himself with the ranger roll. He remembered that he also had, in the go-bag, a space blanket, an emergency Mylar blanket in a foil pouch. He laid the space blanket over the ranger roll.

For a long time, he lay there just listening to the sounds of the woods, to the rustle of leaves in the wind, to a distant owl’s hoot, to water flowing somewhere nearby.

But there were no human sounds, as far as he could ascertain. No footfalls, no crackling of human feet on dry leaves and twigs, no voices.

He was exhausted. The snap of a twig jolted him several times. He froze, listened with ferocious intensity, but each time, it was a false alarm. Not somebody close by. Just the nocturnal sounds of the forest.

It puzzled him that he still hadn’t heard the sounds of his pursuers. Did that mean they hadn’t bothered to come after him in the woods? Or had they gone in the wrong direction? Not for a second did he believe the Russians had given up searching for him. But if so, where the hell were they? Were they moving through the night, using flashlights because they didn’t care if they were detected? If so, they might be just minutes away.

The thought did not allow him to relax. Once, in front of Paul’s mother, his father had used the expression “asshole-puckering” to describe the terror he had sometimes felt in Nam. Paul’s mother had objected to the language. But to Paul, it was evocative.

The ground was frigid, the cold radiating from the boulders’ surfaces. His butt was frozen. He felt a stone or pebble underneath the tarpaulin ground cover, fished around to remove it.

It took a few hours, but eventually he did drift off to sleep, reminding himself that it must be only a brief nap.

Suddenly, he was jolted awake. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep for three hours, far longer than he had wanted. What woke him was an electronic sound, like nothing found in nature. A jumble of electronic beeps, text message sounds. He knew what it was: electronic devices hitting a pocket of signal and suddenly coming online. When you’re climbing over peaks, after a long period of no phone reception, you sometimes randomly hit signals coming out of cell towers—and suddenly, all your devices come to life.

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