Shift Delete

by Gary L. Rashba

  Dinggggg. The noise came from his phone-the familiar notification of a new text message—distracting him. He looked down at the screen and saw a text message from a phone number he did not recognize.

  “You said I could call anytime, but what about texting?” the message read, followed by a yellow emoticon smiley with reddened cheeks.

  He immediately knew it had to be from Layla, and he smiled an almost sinister grin. To be sure, he confirmed the number on a work contact number list. She hadn’t signed her name, assuming that he would know who it had come from, as if he were thinking about her all the time, as she was about him. Sending the text message had taken great courage on her part. It wasn’t something she could consult with anyone about, not even her closest friends and confidants. She felt as if she were opening a window for a breath of fresh air. Her innate brakes that keep a person from rash and impulsive actions were not thinking about the risk to her family and job. For once, she was thinking purely of herself.

  It’s only a text message, she justified to herself after laying awake in bed, agonizing over whether to call Elliot, as he had insinuated, but settled with the easier, less personal and far less scary text message. On the other hand, it meant risking not getting an answer, whereas a phone call goes straight to the person. She felt like she was doing something wrong when she looked up Elliot’s phone number, her hands shaking as she jotted his number down on a small yellow sticky note that she then stuck in her wallet.

  After drafting the message and pressing “send,” she wondered if he would respond immediately and what he would say. She wasn’t committing herself to anything, she reasoned to herself, but there was no escaping the moment she sent that text message.

  As he slowly picked up his phone, Parovsky smiled with pleasure that Layla had taken the bait.

  12. OBSESSION

  Parovsky couldn’t stop thinking about Lippnow. He had looked him up on LinkedIn and Facebook.

  Lippnow’s photograph was the first thing to attract Parovsky’s attention. He looked exactly as he did when they last saw one another nearly a quarter of a century ago. The photograph was professional and respectable for a lawyer: he wore a black suit, pressed white shirt contrasted by a light blue patterned silk tie, his golden hair trimmed short above the ear and parted neatly on the side, probably held in place by styling gel, with sideburns stretching down half the length of his ear, and no discernable trace of grey, at least not in the photo. After all the years gone by, Parovsky still found something sleazy and revolting about the guy.

  Darrel Lippnow

  Law Practice

  Greater New York Area | Law Practice

  Current: Lippnow Law Firm

  Past: Goldfarb, Bronsky & Chittie Law Firm

  Education: American University

  Loyola University New Orleans School of Law Connections: 284

  Websites: www.LippnowLaw.com

  Scrolling down, Parovsky saw that Lippnow had worked at a law firm before striking out on his own, organizations that he belonged to, that he was a Member of the Bar. Standard shit.

  Parovsky wouldn’t admit it to himself, but he was jealous. Even though Lippnow had the backing of wealthy parents to give him a head start, he now had his own law firm and was probably doing quite well for himself. Rather than focusing on what he had accomplished, Parovsky was fixated only on Lippnow’s achievements.

  Lippnow’s Facebook page had photos and selfies with two children and mentioned that he was divorced. He had 146 friends. Yeah, I’m sure these are all close friends. Parovsky scoffed at Facebook, calling it Fakebook, replete with a slogan he coined: “They’re not really your friends.” Parovsky figured he didn’t even know 146 people. He had no patience to read people’s ridiculous posts, and he certainly didn’t give a shit about babies flipping over for the first time, or toddlers going diaper-free.

  Long slumbering feelings of jealousy and resentment awoke. The guy was like Teflon back in college, able to do anything seemingly without consequences. He smashed up his car, probably while drunk. No problem, Darrel. It’s just money. When he wanted some expensive new gadget, he bought it. His attitude was that he could achieve anything he wanted by whatever means, including lying, cheating and stealing. No problem. Fellow students back in college were jealous of his cocky attitude brought on by the easy life he lived, all of which had been handed to him on a proverbial silver platter.

  Parovsky picked up his IPhone and recorded a VoiceMemo: Feeling uneasy, almost nervous thinking about Darrel Lippnow after all these years.

  The more Parovsky thought about Lippnow, the more he despised him. But now Parovsky had the upper hand. He felt almost compelled to play his card, to turn Lippnow into a puppet that he manipulated. I might be able to have some fun with this...

  Copying Lippnow’s law firm’s website from his LinkedIn page, Parovsky went to a website he knew that translated website names to IP address, hosting information and other data, which he used to search for Admin rights to access the system. Parovsky entered the default settings of username: “Admin” and Password: “Password” that most people never bother changing, and with as little effort as that, he found his way in. With two words and a click of the Enter key, Parovsky had penetrated Lippnow’s world.

  From the small number of user profiles, Parovsky quickly discerned the Lippnow Law Firm was a small operation, with each employee having his own user file. Parovsky opened Lippnow’s user file and went to the Outlook files.

  “Let’s see if we can find some passwords,” he said to himself out loud as he entered “Password” in the Search Contacts box. No matches.

  He tried again, entering: “PW” and hit the Enter key.

  “Bingo!” he said out loud, as the computer provided Contacts with access data for Lippnow’s bank account, American Express card, frequent flyer clubs, email account, internet provider, LinkedIn, Facebook, I-Phone, Dropbox and Amazon accounts.

  “Come on Lippnow,” Parovsky said as he shook his head from side to side with a smirk, as if he were truly scolding him. “All your passwords labeled so nicely and easy to find! Shame on you!”

  Parovsky’s attention was distracted by the reverberating boom of thunder. He hadn’t even noticed that the sky had darkened like dusk, and an afternoon thunderstorm squall raged outside. Lightening cracked and flickered across Washington’s sky, in bright, disjointed lines as rain pounded Parovsky’s apartment window. Beads of rainwater covered the glass, while others raced down the window before disappearing below.

  But as every Washingtonian knows, it would soon pass, taking the humidity with it while leaving the air clean and cool.

  For Layla, it had been a stormy period. “A new exercise class,” she had told her husband, was keeping her busy. She was almost telling the truth. It was more like an exercise regime. She had been having more frequent mediocre sex with her husband to assuage guilt and to keep him from feeling unloved or neglected, leaving him happy and oblivious. Parovsky popped out of work on occasion to her suburban home for a mid-morning bout in bed, a shower and then returned to work while Layla’s husband was at work and kids at school, before she went to sleep for the rest of the day before her night shift. When asked, it was a doctor’s appointment or vague response of “a meeting.” Parovsky was beside himself—it was like being with a prostitute, without having to pay. There was no need for lying together in bed cuddling after sex, for it was clear he had to return to work. This was commitment-free for him, unless or until she grew attached and started thinking in terms of “us” and a future together, which he knew from past experience almost inevitably happens. Parovsky was living out fantasies of his own: role playing scenes he had seen in porn videos, like having Layla answer the door wearing nothing more than a pair of high-heeled shoes and taking the lead in seducing him.

  After a “session,” as he thought of it, with Layla, Parovsky headed to the master bedroom�
�s bathroom for a shower to erase any trace of his illicit pastime. He turned on the hot water, which quickly steamed up the glass shower stall doors and mirror, before he stepped inside the cubicle. Parovsky liked the shower at Layla’s house with its strong water pressure, which beat the one in his city apartment building. He turned his face into the strong spray of water cascading down and opened his mouth to rinse it out, washing away telltale odors of sex, while trying to keep his coiffure dry to prevent wet hair from piquing suspicions at work. On the bathroom countertop, he spied one of those clear plastic shower caps one finds in hotel bathrooms alongside the soap and miniature shampoo and hair conditioner bottles, but feared the blow to his image if Layla were to catch him wearing the cap—looking like a cafeteria worker when she inevitably came in to admire the endowment on the Adonis in her shower, which actually made Parovsky a bit self-conscious. He always dried off using Layla’s towel as a rule, lest they get careless and leave an extra wet towel to be discovered. While he would have liked a shower with Layla, they skipped that luxury as a precaution. And if someone—read: her husband—were to come home unexpectedly, they had escapes and evasions planned for locations around the house: the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and others. Planning the escapes was a fun exercise they had planned together, laughing playfully while lying together in bed. They even knew to be careful with text and WhatsApp messages, which can be seen on an IPhone’s Notification Center without password protection. And certainly no soiled condoms or wrappers were left in garbage cans.

  On the way out of her two-story duplex house in a gated community, Parovsky noticed a framed family picture of Layla, her husband and their children all smiling happily posing in one of those Sears photo studio shots, and he actually felt a pang of guilt. He didn’t like the idea of being a home-breaker. “Let’s keep things in perspective,” he had told her, his way of saying she shouldn’t waste her time with thoughts of true romance. “And no gifts,” he added, reminding her that they were just having fun.

  Layla was exhausted from trysts with Parovsky and keeping her husband satiated, but mostly from the exhilarating excitement. Her life had never been such a thrill. She had gone from ordinary working mom to someone living a secret, and thrived on it. In their neighborhood, neighbors looked out for one another. They made it their business to know other people’s business, the neighborhood watch group used to say. A few neighbors noticed the daytime visitor coming by to see Layla on occasion.

  Layla’s lover was similarly living a secret: not of one party to an illicit romance, as she may have thought, but that of stalker of one Darrel Lippnow.

  DCA’s Internal Affairs Division had noticed a few visits Parovsky had made to Deep Web chat rooms frequented by hackers that he had been careless enough to make while at work. While he could say that this was part of his work, visits to the Deep Web still carried a stigma. The irony was that the Deep Web was not bad per se; whistleblowers, freedom of speech or other activists, rape victim support groups and others relied on it to enjoy privacy. Visiting or using the Deep Web in itself is not suspect, and its contents are not all bad, so being there doesn’t incriminate, but because of the potential for wrong-doing, accessing the Deep Web on DCA’s system automatically generated a note.

  13. BACK TO MOSCOW

  “I’m going back to Moscow?!” He couldn’t believe what he had just heard on the phone.

  “Yes, Elliot. You heard me right,” his boss responded. “Go ahead and put in for the trip and email me the travel form. I’ll approve it immediately and forward it to Travel.”

  No point in arguing this, he thought, despite being frustrated about the assignment.

  DCA’s CISO, the de facto person who called the shots rather than the executive appointee agency head—the highfalutin election campaign contributor whose support for the president was repaid with an agency appointment when the president ran out of ambassador slots. She even joked that the agency head didn’t know the difference between antivirus and a firewall. It didn’t reflect well on her that she denigrated others, especially not the agency head. After one such flippant remark at a staff meeting, Parovsky leaned over to Brendan sitting next to him and remarked, “SecDef is a civilian, but I doubt the joint chiefs openly speak that way about him.” It was just one of her attention-grabbing boasts, like her remarks about how late she works, or that she comes in early in the morning, as if she’s trying to prove something, or out to impress.

  DCA’s CISO had come from one of the leading defense industries constantly harangued by state-sponsored hackers known as the Advanced Persistent Threat, or APT, that are out to steal industry and national secrets. She had earned a reputation for knowing how to make tough decisions to ensure the integrity of the IT networks for which she was responsible, whether or not people liked it. In one instance, it was said she cut off email for most of the company’s 100,000 employees— including the CEO—to thwart a network breach. She had climbed the ranks in industry, but was always bothered by feeling like an outsider in a world dominated by an Old Boys network that knew one another from the military. So she gave up her high-paying private sector job in favor of a high-status, lower-paying job at DCA, where she could boast responsibility for the cyber security of the United States Government’s federal agencies.

  So it was back to Moscow for him. It would be a long and uncomfortable trip, and he wasn’t particularly fond of the Russians. And now he had to cooperate with them? Back in Moscow to meet with cyber- defense counterparts—the very people he had deliberately avoided meeting on his earlier trip to send a message of distance.

  But now they had the shared interest of attacks by Estonian hackers. Here was the absurd situation of a U.S. Government boycott in place yet he would be on an officially-sanctioned meeting due to very real shared concerns. Realpolitik in the flesh.

  Parovsky scrolled through old emails until he found the one he was looking for.

  From:Alexandra Iserovich

  To:Elliot Parovsky

  Subject:Meeting you

  Nice to see you in Russia, Mr. Parovsky. ©

  Yours,

  Alexandra

  Had it been instant good karma, he wondered, or all deliberately orchestrated? What the hell, he figured. I’ll give it a shot and find out. He emailed her that he was coming back to Moscow. She replied in an email awash with spelling and grammatical errors that she would be delighted to see him again.

  He traveled even lighter this time; no laptop computer with him, just a briefcase with a hard copy dossier on the Estonia with Honor group that Loretta’s Intel department had put together. The document was nearly fifty pages long, divided into a description of the attacks on the State Department, the group’s gripe with Washington, other attacks they have perpetrated, known members IP addresses, and what else was known about them. Annoying as she was, he couldn’t help but admit that Loretta did good work. He figured he would read the entire document on the flight over.

  “Hi. I’m Emily Herndon.” The woman offered her hand. She had long gray hair bound tightly in a ponytail, baggy travel-friendly clothes and a welcoming smile.

  Parovsky shook her hand along with an indifferent, leave me alone smile.

  “What’s your name? I figure we’ll be the best of friends by the end of this flight!”

  Good God! Why me? I’ve got a talker next to me...

  “Nice to meet you, Emily. I’m Elliot,” he responded as he turned, trying to look busy digging something out of his briefcase.

  “Aren’t you so excited to be going to Moscow? I mean, this place used to be like the lion’s den, and now we’re going there on vacation. It’s so exciting, don’t ya think?”

  The woman’s husband, seated in the aisle seat, leaned forward and glanced over at Parovsky with a friendly smile, and then returned to leafing through Delta’s Sky inflight magazine, obviously content his wife was bothering someone else.

  “I’m h
oping to get lots of sleep and maybe some work done on the flight,” he answered coldly.

  Not getting the hint, she asked, “And what type of work do you do, Elliot?”

  This sucks, he thought. He hadn’t even settled in for the flight and was already having to think about resorting to the more drastic measure of breaking out his folding Bose stereo headphones. Ignoring her question he asked his own rhetorically, “Don’t you just love music? I don’t like to go anywhere without my collection of classic rock music from the 60s and 70s, even the 1980s. I’ve been looking forward to this flight to listen to my collection. It brings me back to simpler days.”

  And with that, he plugged his headphones into his IPhone audio jack. His IPhone held some of his music collection favorites, and was one of the reasons he traveled with it despite the risks. On this trip the plan was to leave his phone on Airplane Mode. That was another thing he hated about flying in economy class: the unforgivably poor quality audio headphones that made it so hard to make out movie dialogue. Even thought he was equipped with his high quality headphones, he often found himself inexplicably watching his neighbor’s video screen rather than his own, which elicited friendly smiles from Mrs. Emily Leave-me-the-fuck-alone Herndon.

  It could be a helluva lot worse, he consoled himself. Like a family with little kids sitting behind him, with one of the urchins kicking his seat the entire fight.

  He always feared finding himself seated next to an infant or toddler, or behind some restless little kid.

  Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, Parovsky was able to get some sleep, yet woke up in pain from sleeping in the unnatural up-right position. He really wasn’t enjoying this: having to climb over this woman seated next to him and her husband just to reach the aisle so he could go to the bathroom or stretch his legs, having the seat in front of him reclining in his face while he’s trying to eat a meal from a tiny plastic tray, and jockeying for the armrest. With the aid of a sleeping pill, he was able to sleep a few hours, waking up once in what felt like sub-zero temperatures, the paper-thin airline blanket proving useless. Lifting his eyeshades, he was horrified to find deeply asleep Mrs. Emily Herndon’s face uncomfortably close to his, some drool rolling down the side of her mouth and her stale breath blowing his way. He leaned back towards the window and struggled to find a new sleeping position, his legs twisted and bent like a contortionist.