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Jane McKinnon jogged along the shoulder of the road toward home. Every morning after her husband, Carey, went off to the hospital to prep for surgery at six, she did tai chi and then went out to run. Sometimes she drove from the big old stone house in Amherst to the Niagara River near the house where she’d grown up, and then ran the three miles along the river to the South Grand Island Bridge and back. That was the run she had always made as a teenager—three miles each way with the wide blue-gray river beside her flowing steadily northward toward the Falls. Sometimes she would drive over the bridge to Grand Island and run along West River Road, looking across the west branch of the river at Navy Island and Canada. Sometimes she ran on one of the college campuses, or in Delaware Park in Buffalo.

Today she ran along the roads near the house she shared with her husband. The house had been here for a long time, the original structure a building made of fieldstones mortared over logs a foot and a half thick around 1760. Carey’s ancestors had done some farming and some trading with her Seneca ancestors who made up most of the population at the time. For the past few generations the McKinnons had been doctors.

When she was a child there had still been thousands of acres of farmland along here, mostly lying fallow and waiting for the developers. Now the developers had been at work for many years, and she ran past deep green golf courses and huge, low houses set far back from the highway and surrounded by enough remnants of old forests to provide shaded yards in the summer and windbreaks against the storms that blew off the Great Lakes in the winter.

Jane seldom ran the same route two days in a row. She never permitted a pattern to develop or ran in a predictable place on a predictable day. Random changes were one of the habits she had nurtured since she was in college. Before she had been Jane McKinnon she had been Jane Whitefield. Now, like other suburban housewives, she bought groceries at supermarkets, but unlike them, she had a list of fourteen markets, and she shopped in them randomly, often at odd hours.

Life was usually quiet for Jane McKinnon, much of it taken up by various kinds of volunteer work—benefits and fund-raising for the hospital, teaching two classes a week in the Seneca language for junior high and high school children at the Tonawanda Reservation during the winter, and helping to elect political candidates in the fall. Jane avoided being chairwoman of any public events, never had her name on stationery, and never identified herself on phone calls for causes except as “Jane.”

Jane still kept bug out kits in the McKinnon house in Amherst and in the house where she had grown up. Each one consisted of a packet with ten thousand dollars in cash and a collection of valid identification cards, credit cards, and licenses. The pictures on the cards were hers and Carey’s, but the names were not. Over the years she had learned to grow identities, using a set of forged papers to obtain real ones, buying things with th