At Risk of Winning (The Max Masterson Series Book 1) (3 page)

he pulled the rowing shell into his private boathouse and activated the sling that raised it out of the water. As he cleaned his gear with fresh water sprayed from the hose and stowed the oars and rowing vest into their assigned spots, he thought of the big picture. It was insidious how Congress had done the unthinkable, but over a period of years, they had stolen a basic right from the American people: The right to be left alone.

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ChAPTER SIX

The senator drove his classic Jaguar XKR convertible slowly down the long driveway toward the house. Although the car was designed for high speed touring on winding roads, he liked to savor his “return to sanity” by driving his lengthy entrance road at little more than an idle, searching for wildlife and shedding the effects of urban clutter that he felt whenever he drove to the Capitol. While a trip into the city gave him the feeling of being closed in, the approach to home had the opposite effect. By the time he pulled the Jag into its pampered space in the garage, he had decompressed enough to let out a sigh that only comfortable surroundings can induce.

he walked through the private tunnel from the garage to the house and considered the news of the day. During his return from the confines of D.C., his ever-active mind had conjured a strategy for protecting Max from the ravages of society, and while it was hot in his mind, he was anxious to sit for ideas.

The concept of sitting for ideas is not new to brilliant, productive people. It involves a process of withdrawing from distractions and entering the mind, where the journey begins. Inside the mind, the creative, ever-active state, once achieved, produces thoughts that flow continuously. Seemingly random ideas can frequently provide the solutions to problems, strategies for complex accomplishments, and new inventions. Depending on the creative bent of the traveler, sitting for ideas can lead the mind down one expected path or the other or shoot off into the realm of the unknown.

The senator’s journey of sitting for ideas took place in a small room off of the study, where a small unadorned desk and a chair, upholstered with memory foam covered with a soft micro-fiber, faced a blank wall. On the desk, a pen and a legal pad were the only items necessary. he sat in the chair and focused his thoughts. Microprocessors in the chair detected his brain waves and projected his thoughts on the wall in front of the desk. he had to focus, and the first ten or fifteen minutes were spent getting rid of the “garbage” as he called the fragments of thoughts, memories that were irrelevant to the issues he chose to focus upon. Even childhood memories bubbled to the surface and were soon gone. When he focused, his mind eventually got to the items he was interested in dealing with.

Max was his focus today. he had just left a think-tank meeting of the Patriot Group, a secret society of sorts, whose primary cause was the preservation and promotion of the American way of life. Their discussion that morning was the extent to which the right to privacy had been eroded by technology and security fears. The consensus of the group was that by the use of technology in society, individual rights had disappeared. Privacy, the right to be left alone, was gone. By accessing records indexed by social security numbers, street addresses, cell phones, and credit card statements, almost anything that had been recorded could be brought to one location. Anything that had ever been entered into a computer database or the internet was accessible in a microsecond, to be sorted and used for any purpose, and there were no secrets from the electronic grasp of government surveillance.

his child was going to need protection from unwanted intrusion into his life. he resolved that he would never ask for nor allow Max to have a social security number or ID card. his medical needs would be met by a personal physician who made house calls and signed a strict confidentiality agreement. The doctor would be paid handsomely for providing exclusive medical care to the Masterson family, but it was necessary to maintain the privacy of their lives.

No computer records were to be kept. Blood tests would be performed in-house, and the results anonymously maintained in the doctor’s excellent mind. No driver’s license, either, although he suspected that Max would rebel against this idea when he became old enough to drive. No purchases by credit in his name or Max’s. Those duties would be performed by a proxy shopper, who would purchase anything from razors to plane tickets. he planned all of it, his mind reaching forward to the day when Max would be an adult and subjected to the microscope of scrutiny that accompanies any venture into the political world.

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ChAPTER SEVEN

his office in the Congressional Office Building had been adorned with artifacts and mementoes from the Jefferson administration. Various inventions of his lifetime hero were on display in the outer office. Jefferson’s hunting rifle and powder flask hung over the expansive fireplace in his comfortable study. It was a place that held memories both pleasant and sinister.

As a result of his long term in the Senate and his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee, his office also displayed numerous handshake pictures and awards. A thorough review of this wealth of acclaim, though, did not reveal partisanship. Democrats and Republicans, American Indians and Indira Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali, Prince William and harry and Lady Diana, all adorned his walls. All of the photographs were basically the same; the senator stood smiling next to each famous person shaking hands with each.

The day after Senator Masterson announced his retirement, the entire office was cleared, its contents packed in large wooden crates and transported to the Smithsonian Institution for public display. A special room was meticulously prepared duplicating his office at the Capitol, and three days later, went on public display to become a part of the enormous collection of national memories too important to discard.

Masterson declined to appear at the public dedication. he couldn’t be located at his Virginia estate, and messages from friends on his cell phone went unanswered. Finally, the storage capacity of his answering service was reached, and callers were met with a video image of the former senator in casual clothes, explaining that he was unavailable for the foreseeable future and would not be returning any calls until he had completed “a little project of mine.” John Masterson had a plan to take all of it back, and he considered it as devout an act of patriotism as his mind could conceive. If he succeeded, he would save the country he loved from a tyranny worse than any dictatorship ever created, and he wasn’t willing to waste a single minute setting it in motion.

The project was named “Closed Door,” a reference to the ambitious goal of protecting the right of citizens to be left alone. They had a right, he reasoned, to disclose information only to those who had their permission and to deny access to the snoopers, who had the unlimited ability to use their private information to hurt them. Most times, the information gathered was innocuous, the indicia of living in a technological society. But it was the mass of it, the sheer volume of information that was mindlessly stored on databases that had the potential to intrude and hurt.

“I brought you all here for a noble purpose,” he announced to the fifty information technology experts he had assembled in a large conference room, all of whom were well aware of his reputation as a straight shooter. “I am paying you big bucks to save the ability of Americans to be Americans, to hold themselves apart from the rest of the world.”

They drank coffee as they listened to the legendary “Minuteman,” who had retired with his head held high, unlike most of his colleagues who had either been carried out feet first or slunk away in hushed disgrace after resigning “to spend more time with my family.”

“You are the best people I could find to make this project a success. I want to build a way to extract private citizens’ information from the internet and give them the right to decide when and with whom they are going to share it.” his words were met with a brief silence as the technicians pondered the problem and the solution, followed by a low muttering as several of them began to frantically scribble notes on yellow legal pads. Masterson waited and watched as their collective minds began to work.

Eventually, a small man in the center of the room stood. he was obviously the de facto leader of the group, and all deferred to him. It was the familiar face of Martin hilliard, a physicist who had gained fame in artificial intelligence. Years earlier, he developed a program that improved the odds of winning at blackjack as each card was dealt. his idea caused a temporary loss at casinos around the world until the casino operators discovered implanted signaling devices in the ear canal of the winners. By that time, hundreds of millions of dollars had been won, which was shared on a 50/50 basis with hilliard. he was fabulously wealthy, but he hadn’t taken his wealth and gone home. he was now using his brilliance to solve more important problems, and today he was in his element.

“Senator, we know of ways to keep new information from being released, and we know how to construct safeguards in a program that will prevent hackers from getting to it, but whatever is already out there can’t be retrieved and protected.” he paused for effect, letting his words sink in.
“You need to understand that we’re talking about millions of databases containing information that can be filtered and sorted,” he declared. “hell, the collective information of the human race is spread out over computers all over the world, and once it’s out there, it can’t be retrieved and secured. It’s much like detonating a nuclear bomb and then trying to put all of the radiation back into the metal shell it was contained in. We can probably start with medical records and psychiatric records, because they have a certain degree of protection, but criminal records, driving records, credit card transactions, phone records—”

Masterson stopped him before he rattled off all of the “can’t do’s.” “Let’s talk about this prospectively. I want a clear-cut system that people can surrender their private information to. I can’t protect what is already out there, but I’m going to try to protect what I can,” he said. “This will be funded by a transaction fee. Authorization codes must be created, and all of the safeguards need to be in place to prevent access to information once it is in the system. That includes the government, the press, and terror organizations. I don’t want some bureaucrat downtown to be able to scan through my medical records and find out my blood type or prescriptions, look at pictures of me having sex with a particular woman, know who I vote for, or what my fears may reveal.”

The senator’s mind was erupting with thoughts that came from years of frustration. It had all started in 2007, after a quantum shift began in the government propaganda machine. To answer complaints that government was invading the privacy of law-abiding Americans, a move began to change the definition of what privacy meant. The old meaning, the right to be left alone, free from prying eyes and ears, had surrendered to technology.

The mass of information about anyone could be sifted and sorted to intrude into every aspect of life, and he had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, something he considered a sacred trust placed upon him by all Americans. he had no intention of keeping government from pursuing terror suspects and enemies of the United States, but the information to be disclosed would be a matter for the courts to decide on an individual basis. It was no longer possible to keep any information private if that information was transmitted electronically, and Senator Masterson had created the mechanism to become the gatekeeper of privacy, or as much of it as could be shielded from those who sought to invade it.

The irony of it all was that once he had sold the concept to Congress and had used his clout to have Gatekeeper become law, he acquired a monopoly, and for privacy’s sake, it could not be undone. he amassed enormous wealth from the one cause that had defined his career. Now privacy meant any information an individual would pay to protect, and that gave him a financial stake in every transaction placed in the Gatekeeper system. Nobody, with the possible exception of his infant son, who he had kept off the grid by design, would be able to protect information from the eyes and ears of the rest of the world without Gatekeeper.

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ChAPTER EIGhT
 

Max progressed rapidly. From the time he could talk, he read. At three years of age, his reading level was the equivalent of a fifth grader, and by the time he was eight, he regularly read the Wall Street Journal and had begun regular discussions with Adrianna and his father on world affairs issues. The nanny who cared for his needs as an infant was no longer needed, and Max spent most of his days with the only family he had ever known.

homeschooling with Adrianna involved a daily ritual of one-onone instruction, followed by three hours of internet learning, followed by life instructions and outdoor sports activity. In the evening, Max read while the senator attended social events and other adult activities. Rather than the typical Saturday and Sunday off routine that was enjoyed by other school-aged children, Max adhered to his schedule seven days a week.

he never got to sleep in on a Saturday morning, but since he had never done that, he didn’t miss it. Even though his friends were constantly puzzled by his lack of desire to “take time off,” his life was normal in most respects, and he was developing well. Adrianna was an accomplished teacher and dedicated her life to the education of Max until his studies at home were complete.

he wasn’t so much pushed as encouraged to excel, and he accomplished much in his studies. he was given the choice of a variety of new subjects to learn each day, all part of a list prepared to give him a broad education. Each day’s teachings also involved one subject that had been previously covered. Tests allowed him to cover subjects for a third time, and by the time he had completed the learning cycle, it had been reinforced in his mind as a complete idea. his teacher had pioneered the technique in college, and the senator came across her thesis in his research to find Max one person who would be his instructor and a significant mentor during his formative years.