CyberStorm Read Free

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.”