CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013 Read online

  Richard had gracefully invited us down the hall for after-dinner drinks, to their palatial three-story apartment that faced the Manhattan skyline, where we were served hand and foot by his wife, Sarah—“Of course we cooked our own turkey. Didn’t you?”

  The conversation had quickly centered on connections between the old New York and Boston family lines: “Fascinating, isn’t it? Richard, you must be almost a third cousin to our Lauren,” quickly followed by, “Mike, do you know any of your own family history?”

  I did, and it involved steel working and nightclubs, so I said I didn’t.

  Mr. Seymour finished off the evening with an interrogation of Lauren about her new job prospects, which were nonexistent. Richard was helpful with many suggestions about introductions he could make for her. They’d politely asked me how my business was going, followed by proclamations that the internet was just too complicated to even talk about, and then: “Now, Richard, how is your family investment trust being managed?”

  To be fair, Lauren did defend me, and everything remained civilized.

  I spent most of the time chauffeuring them around to meet their friends at places like the Metropolitan Club, the Core Club, and of course, the Harvard Club. The Seymours had the distinction of having at least one member of each generation of their family attend Harvard since its foundation, and at the namesake club they were treated like visiting royalty.

  Richard had even graciously invited us to the Yale Club for a drink on Friday night.

  I nearly throttled him.

  Mercifully, it was just a two-day visit, and finally, we had the weekend to ourselves.

  It was early Saturday morning, and I was sitting at our granite kitchen countertop feeding Luke, with him in his highchair and me balancing on a barstool while I watched the morning news on CNN. I was cutting apples and peaches up into little chunks and leaving them in front of him on a plate. In the height of merriment he was picking each piece up, smiling a toothy, gummy grin at me, and then either eating the fruit or squealing and throwing it on the floor for Gorby, the Borodins’ rescue dog mongrel.

  It was a game that just didn’t get old. Gorby spent nearly as much time in our apartment as he did at home with Irena, and watching Luke throw food down to him, it wasn’t hard to understand why. I wanted our own dog, but Lauren was against it. Too much hair, she said.

  Banging his fists on the tray, Luke squeaked, “Da!” his universal word for anything involving me, and then outstretched his small hand—more apple please.

  I shook my head, laughing, and reached over to begin cutting up some more fruit.

  Luke was just two years old, but he had the heft of a three-year-old, something he probably got from his dad, I thought with a smile. Wisps of golden-blond hair floated about his chubby cheeks that always glowed warmly. His face was permanently stuck in a mischievous grin, showing a mouthful of white button teeth, as if he was about to do something he knew he wasn’t supposed to—which was almost always the case.

  Lauren appeared out of our bedroom, her eyes still half-closed from sleep.

  “I don’t feel well,” she said unsteadily and then stumbled into our small bathroom, the only other closed room in our less-than-thousand-square-foot, loft-style apartment. I heard her coughing loudly and then the sound of the shower turning on.

  “Coffee’s on,” I muttered, thinking, she didn’t drink that much last night, while I watched some enraged Chinese students in the city of Taiyuan burning American flags. I’d never heard of Taiyuan, so while I dropped some more fruit chunks in front of Luke with one hand, I queried my tablet with the other.

  Wikipedia: Taiyun (Chinese: pinyin: Tàiyuán) is the capital and largest city of Shanxi province in North China. At the 2010 census, it had a population of 4,201,591.

  Wow.

  That was bigger than Los Angeles, America’s second largest city, and Taiyun was China’s twentieth. With a few more keystrokes I discovered that China had over 160 cities with populations over a million, where the United States had exactly nine.

  I looked up from my tablet at the news. The image on the TV had switched to an aerial view of a strange-looking aircraft carrier. An anchor on CNN described the scene, “Here we see China’s first, and so far only, aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, ringed by a pack of angry-looking Lanzhou-class destroyers as they face off with the USS George Washington just outside the Straits of Luzon in the South China Sea.”

  “Sorry about my parents, honey,” whispered Lauren as she snuck up behind me, mopping her hair with a towel and dressed in a white terry cloth bathrobe. “Remember, it was your idea.”

  She leaned down and cuddled Luke, kissing him while he smiled and squeaked his pleasure at such attention, and then she wrapped her arms around me tightly and kissed my neck.

  I smiled and nuzzled her back, enjoying the affection after a tense couple of days.

  “I know.”

  A US naval officer had appeared on CNN. “Not five years ago Japan was telling us to get our boys out of Okinawa, but now they’re begging for help again. Japs have a fleet of their own aircraft carriers coming down here, why on Earth—”

  “I love you, baby.” Lauren had slipped one of her hands under my T-shirt and was stroking my chest.

  “I love you too.”

  “Have you thought more about going to Hawaii for Christmas?”

  “—and Bangladesh will be hit hard if China diverts the Brahmaputra. They need friends now more than ever, but I never imagined the Seventh Fleet parking itself in Chittagong—”

  I sighed and pulled away from her.

  “You know I’m not comfortable having your family pay.”

  “So then let me pay.”

  “With money that comes from your father.”

  “Only because I’m not working because I quit my job to have Luke,” she said loudly. It was a sore point.

  We’d completely pulled away from each other, and she turned to grab a cup from the cupboard and filled it with coffee. Black. No sugar this morning. She leaned against the stove and cupped her hands around the hot coffee, hunching inwards and away from me.

  “—starting cyclic ops around the clock, constant launch and recovery missions from the three American aircraft carriers now stationed in—”

  “It’s not just the money. I’m not comfortable spending Christmas there with your mother and father, and we did Thanksgiving with them.”

  She ignored me. “I’d just finished articling at Latham and passing the bar”—she was speaking more to herself than to me—“and now everyone is downsizing. I threw the opportunity away.”

  “You didn’t throw it away, honey,” I said softly, looking at Luke. “We’re all suffering. This new downturn is hard on everyone.”

  In the silence between us, the CNN anchor started on a new topic. “Reports today of US government websites being hacked and defaced. With Chinese and American naval forces squaring off, tensions of conflict heighten. We go now to our correspondent at Fort Meade Cyber Command headquarters—”

  “What about going to Pittsburgh? See my family?”

  “—the Chinese are claiming the defacement of US government websites is the work of private citizen hacktivists, and most of the activity seems to be originating from Russian sources—”

  “Seriously? You won’t take a free trip to Hawaii and you want me to go to Pittsburgh?” Now she looked angry. “Your brothers are both convicted criminals. I’m not sure I want to expose Luke to that kind of environment.”

  I shrugged. “Come on, they were teenagers when that happened. We talked about this.”

  She said nothing.

  “Didn’t one of your cousins get arrested last summer?” I said defensively.

  “Arrested,” she replied, shaking her head, “but not convicted. There is a difference.”

  I paused and stared into her eyes. “Not all of us are so lucky to have an uncle who’s in Congress.”

  Luke was watching the two of us.

  “
So,” I asked, my voice rising, “what was it your father wanted you to think about?”

  I already knew it was some new offer to entice her back to Boston.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Really?”

  She sighed and looked down into her coffee. “A partner-track position at Ropes and Gray.”

  “I didn’t know you applied.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I’m not moving to Boston, Lauren. I thought the whole idea of us coming here was for you to start your own life.”

  “It was.”

  “I thought we were trying for another one, a little brother or sister for Luke? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “More what you wanted.”

  I looked at her in disbelief, my vision of our future together unraveling in just one sentence. But there had been more than one uncomfortable sentence lately. My stomach knotted.

  “I’m going to be thirty this year,” she added. “Opportunities like this don’t come often. It could be my last chance to have a career.”

  Silence while we stared at each other.

  “I’m going to the interview.”

  “That’s all the discussion?” My heart began to race. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “I just told you why.”

  We stared at each other in a mutually accusatory silence. Luke began to fuss in his chair.

  Lauren sighed, her shoulders sagging. “I don’t know, okay? I feel lost. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  I relaxed, and my pulse began to slow a little.

  Lauren looked at me. “I’m going for brunch with Richard to talk about some ideas he had for me.”

  My pulse raced again, my cheeks flushing.

  “I think he beats Sarah.”

  Her eyes flashed angrily. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Did you see her arms at the barbecue? She was covering up. I saw bruises.”

  Shaking her head, she snorted, “You’re being jealous. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What should I be jealous of?” I shot back angrily.

  Luke began to cry.

  “I’m going to get dressed,” she said dismissively, shaking her head. “Don’t ask stupid questions. You know what I mean.”

  Ignoring me, she leaned down and kissed Luke, whispering that she was sorry, she didn’t mean to yell, and that she loved him. Once she’d calmed Luke down, she gave me an evil look and stalked off into the bedroom, closing the door heavily behind her.

  Sighing, I turned toward Luke and picked him up. I eased his head onto my shoulder and began to pat his back softly.

  “Why did she marry me, huh, Luke?” I whispered under my breath.

  I answered my own question.

  “Ah, yes, well, we’ve got you, don’t we, big bruiser?”

  With two or three sniffling sighs, I felt his little body relax into me.

  “Come on. Let’s take you over to see Ellarose and Auntie Susie.”

  December 8

  “HOW MANY OF these are there?”

  “Fifty. And that’s just the water.”

  “You’re kidding. I’ve only got half an hour before I need to be upstairs for the sitter.”

  Chuck shrugged. “I’ll ring Susie. She can watch Luke.”

  “Great,” I replied sarcastically as I struggled down the stairs holding four-gallon containers of water in each hand. “So two hundred gallons of water you’re paying five hundred dollars a month to store?”

  Chuck owned several Cajun-fusion restaurants in Manhattan, and you’d have thought he could store stuff at one of them, but he said he needed to have it close. A card-carrying member of the Virginia Preppers couldn’t be too careful, he liked to say. He had some decidedly non-New Yorker sensibilities.

  His family was from just south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He was an only child, and his mother and father had died in a car accident just after he finished college, so when he met Susie, they’d decided on a new start and had come to New York. My own mother had passed away when I was in college, and I’d barely known my father. He’d left when I was a kid, so my brothers had pretty much raised me.

  Our similar family situations had bonded us when we met.

  “That’s about the size of it,” laughed Chuck, “and I’m lucky I got this extra locker.”

  He snickered watching my efforts.

  “You need to hit the gym a little more, my friend.”

  I trudged down the last few steps to the basement. Where the rest of our complex was beautifully decorated and maintained—manicured Japanese gardens next to the gym and spa, an indoor waterfall at the entrance, twenty-four-seven security guards—the basement was decidedly utilitarian. The polished oak steps leading down from the back entrance gave way to a rough concrete floor with exposed overhead lighting. I guess it was because nobody really ever went down there.

  Nobody, that was, except Chuck.

  I halfheartedly laughed at his jab, not really listening to him. My mind was turning over and over, thinking about Lauren. When she and I had met at Harvard, anything had seemed possible, but it seemed to be slipping away.

  Today she’d gone for the interviews in Boston and was spending the evening with her family there. Luke had been at preschool this morning, but I hadn’t been able to find a sitter for the afternoon, so I’d returned home from work. Lauren and I had some heated exchanges over her going to the interviews, but there was more to it than that.

  There’s something she’s not telling me.

  Down the end of the hallway, I stopped and elbowed open the door to Chuck’s storage locker. With a grunt I lifted my two water jugs and stacked them on top of the pile he’d started.

  “Pack ‘em tight,” said Chuck, waddling up behind me with his own load. He stacked his in, and we turned to go back and get more.

  “Did you see that stuff online today?” asked Chuck. “Wikileaks publishing Pentagon plans for bombing Beijing?”

  I shrugged, still thinking about Lauren. I remembered the first time I saw her walking between the red-brick campus buildings of Harvard, laughing with her friends. I’d just gotten into the MBA program, using money I’d earned from selling my stake in a media start-up, and she’d just started the law program. We’d both been filled with dreams of making the world a better place.

  “They’re making a lot of noise about it in the media,” continued Chuck, still talking about the Pentagon leak, “but I don’t think it’s a big deal. Just role-playing exercises.”

  “Uh-huh,” I replied, my mind not able to move away from Lauren.

  Soon after we met, heated discussions in Harvard Square beer halls had led to passionate nights. I’d been the first of my family to attend university, never mind Harvard, and I’d known she was from some old-money family, but at the time it hadn’t seemed relevant. This was America, after all, and my star was rising. She’d wanted to escape from the confines of her family, and I’d wanted everything she represented.

  We’d married quickly after graduation, eloped, and moved to New York. Her father hadn’t been impressed. Almost as soon as we married, Luke had been conceived—an accident. A happy accident, but one that had dramatically changed the new world we’d barely settled ourselves into.

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

  By then Chuck and I were standing on the sidewalk of Twenty-Fourth Street after exiting the back entrance to our building. It was raining, and the icy gray skies matched my mood. Just a week ago it had been warm, but the temperature had sharply dropped.

  This section of Twenty-Fourth, less than two blocks from Chelsea Piers and the Hudson River, was more of a back alley. Parked cars lined both sides of the narrow street below windows covered in mesh grills, and the sound of cars honking floated down from Ninth Avenue in the distance.

  To one side of our building there was some kind of a taxi repair shop, and a small gang of men stood outside under the grimy awning, smoking cigarettes and laughing
. Chuck had arranged for his delivery of water to be shipped to the garage.

  “Are you okay?” asked Chuck, gently clapping me on the back.

  We wound our way through the taxi drivers and mechanics to his pallet, off to one side of the garage, and picked up some more containers of water.

  “Sorry,” I replied after a pause, grunting as I picked up my load. “Lauren and I—”

  “Yeah, I heard from Susie. So she’s off for an interview in Boston?”

  I nodded. “We live in a million-dollar condo, but it’s not good enough. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, I couldn’t even imagine living in a million-dollar home.” I worked as a junior partner in a venture capital fund specializing in social media, and affording the condo was a stretch on my salary, but at the same time I didn’t feel like I could afford anything less.

  “Neither could she, and by that I mean only a million-dollar home,” he laughed. “Hey, you knew what you were getting into.”

  “And she’s always off with Richard when I’m working.”

  Chuck stopped and put down his water containers.

  “Cut that short. I agree he’s a creep, but Lauren is totally not like that.”

  He swiped his badge past the security device on the back entrance. When it didn’t work after two tries, he rummaged around in his pockets for a key.

  “Stupid thing doesn’t work half the time,” he muttered under his breath. He opened the door and turned to me. “Just give her some time and space to figure it out. Turning thirty is a big deal for women.”

  I walked in ahead of him while he held the door open.

  “I guess you’re right. Now what were you talking about?”

  “The news today. Things are getting totally out of hand in China. Have you been watching? More burning flags outside embassies, ransacking American stores. FedEx said they had to stop operations in China, even delivery of vaccines for the bird flu outbreak, and now Anonymous is threatening to attack them in retaliation.”

  Anonymous was the citizen hacktivist group we’d been reading about more and more in the news. We’d reached the storage locker again, and we stacked the water containers.