CyberStorm (2 page)

Her family was old-money Bostonian, dyed-in-the-tweed Brahmins, and while early on I’d done my best to earn their good humor, lately I’d given up and settled into a grudging understanding that I’d never be good enough. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t polite.

“Mr. Seymour,” I called out, outstretching my hand, “thank you so much for coming.”

Dressed in a square-shouldered tweed jacket accented with a navy handkerchief, blue oxford shirt, and a brown paisley tie, Mr. Seymour looked up from talking with Lauren, and smiled a tight-lipped smile. I immediately felt self-conscious in my jeans and T-shirt. Covering the last few paces, I reached out to grip his hand and pumped it firmly.

“And, Mrs. Seymour, as lovely as ever,” I added, turning toward my wife’s mother. She was sitting uncomfortably on a wooden bench beside her husband and daughter, dressed in a brown suit with a matching oversized hat and a thick strand of pearls around her neck. Clutching her purse tightly in her lap, she leaned forward as if to get up.

“No, no, please, don’t.” I leaned down to peck her on the cheek. She smiled and sat back down on the edge of the bench. “Thank you for coming to spend Thanksgiving with us.”

“So you’ll think about it?” Mr. Seymour said loudly to Lauren. You could almost make out the layers of ancestry in his voice, thick with both privilege and responsibility, and today, perhaps a little condescension. He was making sure I could hear what he said.

“Yes, Dad,” Lauren whispered, stealing a glance my way and looking down. “I will.”

I didn’t take the bait and ignored it.

“Have you been introduced to the Borodins?”

I motioned toward the elderly Russian couple that were sitting at the table beside them. Aleksandr, the husband, was already asleep in a lounger, snoring quietly away beside his wife, Irena, who was busy on her knitting.

The Borodins lived right next door to us. I’d sometimes spend hours listening to Mrs. Borodin’s stories of the war. They’d survived the siege of Leningrad, the modern St. Petersburg, and I found it fascinating how she could have lived through something so horrific yet be so positive and gentle with the world. She cooked amazing borscht, too.

“Lauren introduced us. A pleasure,” mumbled Mr. Seymour, smiling Mrs. Borodin’s way. She looked up and smiled back, and then returned to her pair of half-knitted socks.

“So,” I said, spreading my arms, “have you guys seen Luke yet?”

“No, he’s downstairs with Ellarose and the sitter at Chuck and Susie’s place,” replied Lauren. “We haven’t had a chance to go and see him yet.”

“But we’ve already been invited to the Met,” said Mrs. Seymour brightly, perking up. “Dress rehearsal tickets for the new
Aida
performance.”

“Oh yeah?”

I looked at Lauren and then turned toward Richard, another of our neighbors, who was definitely
not
on my favorites list.

“Thanks,
Dick
.”

Square-jawed and handsome, he’d been some kind of football star in his Yale days. His wife, Sarah, was a tiny thing, and she sat behind him like a hand-shy puppy. She quickly pulled the cuffs of her sweater down to cover her bare arms when I glanced at her.

“I know the Seymours love the opera,” explained Richard in his thick-money accent, like a Manhattan stock broker describing an investment option. Where the Seymours were Old Boston, Richard’s family was Old New York. “We have the ‘friends and family’ seating at the Met. I only have four tickets, and Sarah didn’t want to go”—his wife shrugged weakly behind him—“and I didn’t mean to presume, but I didn’t think it was your kind of thing, old boy. I thought I could take Lauren and the Seymours, a little Thanksgiving treat?”

While Mr. Seymour’s accent sounded genuine, Richard’s faux-British-prep-school affectation grated on my ears.

“I guess.”

What the hell is he up to?

Awkward pause.

“We need to get going if we’re going to make it,” added Richard, raising his eyebrows. “It’s an early rehearsal.”

“But we were just about to start serving,” I said, pointing back toward the checker-clothed tables set with bowls of potato salad and paper plates. Tony smiled and waved at me with the tongs while he piled burnt sausage and chicken atop a serving tray.

“That’s all right, we’ll stop for something,” said Mr. Seymour, again with his tight-lipped smile. “Richard was just telling us about a wonderful new bistro on the Upper East Side.”

“It was just an idea,” added Lauren uncomfortably. “We were talking and Richard mentioned it.”

I took a deep breath, balling my hands into fists, but caught myself and sighed. My hands relaxed. Family was family, and I wanted Lauren to be happy. Maybe this would help. I rubbed one eye and exhaled slowly.

“That’s actually a great idea.” I looked toward my wife with a genuine smile and felt her relax. “I’ll take care of Luke, so don’t hurry back. Enjoy yourselves.”

“Are you sure?” asked Lauren.

An inch of gratitude propped our relationship back up.

“I’m sure. I’ll just grab a few beers with the boys.” On reflection, this was sounding like a better and better idea. “You best get going. Maybe we can meet for a nightcap?”

“It’s settled then?” said Mr. Seymour.

Within a few minutes they were gone and I was back with the guys, piling my plate with sausages and rooting around in the cooler for a beer.

I slumped down in a chair.

Chuck looked at me with a forkful of potato salad halfway into his mouth. “That’s what you get for marrying a girl with a name like Lauren Seymour.”

I laughed and cracked my beer open. “So what’s the word regarding this mess between China and India over those dams in the Himalayas?”

November
27

THE FAMILY VISIT didn’t go well.

Thanksgiving dinner started the disaster rolling, first because we ordered a precooked turkey from Chelsea Market—“Oh my, you don’t cook your own turkey?”—and then the awkward dinner seating around our kitchen countertop—“When are you buying a bigger apartment?”—with the finale of me not being able to watch the Steelers game—“That’s fine, if Michael wants to watch football, we’ll just make our way back to the hotel.”

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.