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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 like How to Change Your Identity and How to Disappear Forever and How to Disappear and Never Be Found and How 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.