Chapter Five The Party #2
The gist, as far as he could grasp it, was this: most cybersecurity worked by recognising known threats, like a bouncer checking IDs against a list of banned patrons.
Anastasia’s system worked differently. It learned what normal behaviour looked like, for a computer network, for a user, for a whole organisation and then flagged anything that deviated from that normal.
It wasn’t looking for specific attacks; it was looking for anything unusual.
‘So it’s like... a very clever lock?’ James ventured.
Anastasia’s mouth twitched. ‘It’s... yes. Yes, it’s like a very clever lock. One that knows who’s supposed to be in the house and gets suspicious if anyone acts strangely.’
‘That I understand. My grandmother was the same way. She could tell if someone had moved a cushion half an inch. Drove the housekeepers mad.’
‘Your grandmother would have made an excellent security system.’
‘She would have. She actually...’ James stopped, unsure if he should continue.
‘She actually what?’
‘Nothing. Family stuff, boring.’
‘I doubt that.’ Anastasia turned to face him fully, leaning one hip against the rail. ‘Tell me about your grandmother. The suspicious one.’
So James told her about Granny: about the Foreign Office rumours, the languages, the way she looked at people.
He told her about the other grandmother too, the kind one, who had died when he was twelve and left him a watercolour of the Sussex Downs that always reminded him of the long walks they took.
Anastasia listened with what seemed like genuine interest, asking occasional questions, laughing at his description of Granny’s interrogation techniques at family dinners.
In return, she told him about her own grandmother, a woman from Kyiv who had survived the Soviet era through a combination of stubbornness and strategic deafness to anything the authorities said.
‘She pretended not to understand Russian,’ Anastasia said. ‘For forty years. Whenever anyone official asked her questions, she would respond only in Ukrainian, very slowly, as if she was trying to help them understand. It drove them mad, but they couldn’t prove she wasn’t just old and confused.’
‘Was she? Old and confused?’
‘She was old, but she was never confused about anything in her life.’ Anastasia smiled and there was something in the expression, fondness mixed with loss, that James recognised.
‘She died a few years ago. Just before the war started, sometimes I think it was a mercy. She would have hated what happened to Kyiv.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be, she had a good life, a long life. She used to say that the secret to surviving bad times was to be too stubborn to die.’
‘That sounds like good advice.’
‘It was. It is.’ Anastasia looked out at the water. ‘I think about it often.’
They stood in silence for a moment. The party continued above them, laughter, music, the clink of glasses, but it felt very far away.
‘Can I ask you something?’ James said eventually.
‘You’ve been asking me things for the last hour.’
‘Something more personal.’
She raised an eyebrow but didn’t refuse.
‘Why did you leave Ukraine? I mean, I know why people left: the war, obviously. But you said you came west two years ago and you’ve built this company and you seem very.
..’ He searched for the right word. ‘Established, like you’ve been doing this forever, but you haven’t.
You’ve only been out for two years. How does someone do that? ’
It was a more serious question than he usually asked, especially of women he’d just met at parties. But something about Anastasia, her directness, maybe, or the way she’d been honest about what she knew of him already, made James want to be direct in return.
She was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that James worried he’d overstepped.
‘You leave or you die,’ she said finally.
Her voice was matter-of-fact, not seeking sympathy.
‘It’s not complicated. When those are your options, everything else becomes very clear.
You don’t waste time on things that don’t matter or hesitate.
You build what you need to build, as fast as you can, because you know what it’s like to have everything taken away. ’
‘That must have been...’
‘It was what it was.’ Her tone didn’t invite sympathy, exactly, but it didn’t reject it either. ‘Everyone who left has a story like that. I’m not special. I’m just... motivated.’
‘I think you might be a little bit special.’
She looked at him sharply, as if checking for mockery and found none.
‘That’s a strange thing to say to someone you’ve just met.’
‘Probably, but then I say a lot of strange things. Ask anyone who knows me.’
‘I already did.’
‘What?’
‘I asked you about you, earlier.’ She smiled at his surprise. ‘I like to know who I’m talking to.’
‘And what did I tell you?’
‘That you’re nice, fairly harmless and clearly well off.
That you went to university for fun and studied a little of something you already enjoyed, you work in insurance without anyone being quite sure what you actually do.
That you’re single, come from old money and have never done anything you consider notable in your life. ’
James absorbed this, it was, he had to admit accurate. Unflattering, but accurate.
‘Harmless,’ he repeated. ‘That’s... that’s a word.’
‘Is it inaccurate?’
He considered it. He had never thought of himself as harmless (no one wants to think of themselves that way) but he supposed, from a certain perspective, it was true.
‘Probably not,’ he admitted. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever harmed anything more substantial than a bottle of wine.’
‘Then harmless isn’t an insult, in this crowd it’s practically a compliment.’
She turned to look at the coast and James found himself studying her profile against the darkening sky. The lights of Cap Ferrat glittered like scattered jewels and the yacht rocked gently beneath them.
‘You’re not what I expected,’ Anastasia said.
‘What did you expect?’
‘Someone more... showy. The men at these parties usually have an agenda. They want something: money, connections, sex and everything they say is designed to get it.’ She turned back to face him. ‘You just say whatever you’re thinking.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’ She smiled, taking the edge off the words. ‘But it’s interesting and I don’t meet many interesting people anymore.’
‘That’s because you’re talking to investors and investors are boring; it’s a professional requirement.’
‘And who do you talk to, James Ashworth-Pemberton?’
‘Mostly just my friends and they’re all idiots, so the bar for interesting is quite low.’
She shook her head, but she was still smiling. ‘You’re determined to be self-deprecating.’
‘It’s easier than the alternative.’
‘Which is?’
‘Admitting that I’m actually quite nervous.’ James heard himself say the words and felt a flicker of surprise. He hadn’t meant to be quite that honest. ‘I don’t usually talk to women who make me nervous I usually just avoid them entirely. Much safer.’
‘And yet you came over to talk to me.’
‘Yes, well. Sometimes you see someone and you think, ‘I could play it safe and always wonder, or I could make a complete fool of myself and at least know for certain.’’ He finished the last of his wine.
‘And which is this? Playing it safe or making a fool of yourself?’
‘I suspect the latter, but I’ll let you be the judge.’
???
They talked for another hour, then two. The party above them wound down, music fading, with the more riotous guests heading to another wilder party, led by the commodore of the Monaco yacht club, who was fully clothed in the small pool by the bar with several much younger women, none of whom were his wife.
The deck grew quieter, but James and Anastasia remained at the rail, absorbed in each other, moving only when a steward appeared with fresh wine or to suggest they might be more comfortable inside.
They didn’t want to be more comfortable inside. They were perfectly comfortable where they were, even if the evening brought a chill to the air. Anastasia wrapped a pashmina around her shoulders and James wouldn’t have noticed if it started snowing.
At some point, he wasn’t sure when, her hand had come to rest on the rail next to his, close enough that their fingers were almost touching. Neither of them acknowledged it, but neither of them moved away.
‘I should go,’ Anastasia said eventually, glancing at her phone. ‘I have a meeting in the morning with actual investors. The kind who might write actual cheques.’
‘Right, of course, business.’
‘Business.’ She said it without enthusiasm.
They stood there for a moment, neither quite willing to end the conversation.
‘Can I...’ James started, then stopped. ‘I mean, would you...’ He tried again. ‘Could I perhaps take you to dinner? Sometime? When you’re not meeting investors or building companies or any of the impressive things you do?’
Anastasia looked at him for a long moment. James had the distinct impression of being assessed again, but this time the assessment felt different. Less professional. More personal.
‘I travel a lot, but I am based in London,’ she said. ‘That is where my company is based.’
‘I live in London, so I’m there most of the time. If you’re ever... I mean, if you’d like to... we could perhaps...’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’ She reached into a small clutch bag and produced a business card, proper card stock, elegantly designed, just her name, email and phone number. ‘Send me a message. We’ll arrange something.’
James took the card carefully. ‘I will. I’ll... I’ll drop you a line.’
‘You do that.’ She smiled and for a moment there was something in the expression that wasn’t business, wasn’t anything James could quite name. Then she turned and walked toward the boarding platform, where a tender was waiting to take guests back to shore.
James watched her go.
Claudette appeared at his elbow, champagne in hand, her earlier disappointment apparently forgotten or at least filed away for later.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Did you make a spectacle of yourself?’
‘Probably.’
‘And was it worth it?’
James looked at the business card in his hand. Anastasia Kovalenko. A name he hadn’t known a few hours ago. The woman he’d spent an evening talking to, mostly about cybersecurity and grandmothers.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think it might have been.’
Claudette sighed the sigh of a woman who recognises the inevitable. ‘Young love. So tedious, so relentless.’ She patted his arm with something that might have been affection. ‘Come, I’ll take you back to shore. You can stare at her business card in privacy.’
They descended to the boarding platform, where Claudette’s Riva waited. As they pulled away from the Artemisia, James looked back at the yacht one last time, the lights dimming now, the decks emptying, the party winding to its close.
Somewhere out there, in another tender heading to shore, was a woman in a red velvet dress who had given him her phone number.
He hadn’t won the double, the E-type was still Freddie’s and his rental car was probably being towed from the bus stop.
But James found, somewhat to his surprise, that he didn’t mind any of it.
Some things, it turned out, were worth losing for.