Internet Kill Switch (27 page)

6
8

President French gave a memorable speech from the Oval Office in front of the TV cameras. Commanding and strong, he was the consummate leader. He mixed in just enough empathy with his vow to track down the perpetrators of this criminal act against America.

“We will find you,” he said, directly into the camera. “Wherever you are, here or abroad. You cannot hide from us. And when we find you, we will make sure you answer for your crimes.”

A bravura performance, everyone told him. “I just hope it got the message across to the maggots who did this,” he said. They assured him it had.

After the cameras had gone,
French sat behind the most famous desk in the world. He had a half-hour to kill before meeting the press in the White House Briefing Room, so he poured himself a double bourbon. “You will answer for your crimes,” he repeated softly to himself as the bourbon relaxed his mind. He was sure, even if his military and security advisors weren’t, that this was the work of Islamic militants. It’s a conviction from which he would not be shaken.

And, as he did whenever he thought about Muslims, he thought about
her.
About the fact that she wasn’t here now, would never be here again. If weren’t for the Murdering Muslim Maniacs, he could be with her right now.

He’d never tell anyone, of course -- not even himself -- but in reality, this desire to wipe Islamic fundamentalism from the face of the earth was about her
.
Samantha Morgenstern. Oh, she was beautiful. The most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen; she made his wife, Tabitha, look like an orangutan.

He met
Samantha many years before, when he was Lt. Governor of Florida. She was a video producer for a website that covered Florida politics. The site wanted to make a film about his rise in politics, starting with his poverty-stricken childhood; rising above his circumstances to eventually become a college football star; his entry into local politics, which led to statewide office, then to Lt. Governor.

French was a golden child; everything he did succeeded. His good looks and athletic build certainly helped, as did his easy charm and ability to connect with voters who always seemed to prefer handsome men and pretty women to ugly ones when it came to the ballot box. His teams at Florida State only lost nine games in his four years there, and his political career had an even better winning streak: he had
never suffered defeat at the hands of voters.

So Samantha Morgenstern and a small film crew followed him around for months, collecting footage for a documentary they called
Prince Charmed: The Life and Times of Cameron French
. French came across as a confident, driven man destined for high office. His opponents called it a two-hour infomercial for his political ambitions; his supporters called it a revealing glimpse into a self-made man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

During the filming, French found himself captivated by Samantha’s beaut
y and fierce intellect. She was similarly drawn to him, even though she knew it would be unethical to get involved with the subject of a documentary she was producing; even more so when that subject was married with children.

But French
finally broke down her resistance, and they began a clandestine affair that lasted years. They were extremely discreet, to the point that no one knew anything about it. A few of those closest to them suspected that something might be going on, but they were always careful of where they met and when, and it was never in Florida.

Eventually, Samantha started bringing up the question of French leaving his wife and marrying her. At first, he wouldn’t even consider it;
it would destroy his political career. Certainly, politicians had done much worse and survived, but French aimed higher than state office. His success in everything he did convinced him that the presidency was his future, and he didn’t know if America would elect a divorced man; Reagan was the only one who had pulled it off.

But as his relation
ship with Samantha continued to grow, he began to think that maybe he should dump Tabitha and see what happened. His love for Samantha was deep, not to mention torrid. He’d started taking more chances just to be with her, which required more logistical gymnastics. And if it cost him the presidency, well, even that might be worth the price, to be with the true love of his life.

That he could have s
uch thoughts shocked French, who’d been laser-focused on his political ambition his entire adult life. Would he really do it? He started kicking the thought around in his mind.

But the decision was taken out of his hands
many years ago on the streets of London. An Al-Qaeda terrorist blew up a restaurant near Hyde Park, in retaliation for some perceived wrong by “The West.” Among his victims was Samantha Morgenstern, who had been eating a Caesar salad at the time, waiting for a British politician she planned to interview for a documentary.

Her death
completely wrecked French for months. His aides, wife and children had no idea why he’d slipped into a black funk. Of course, he couldn’t tell anyone; he chalked it up to the stresses of his job. He ached from the time he woke up in the morning until he went to sleep at night. He managed to work, but not well. He even thought about giving up politics.

Then
fate stepped in: Florida’s governor died of a massive stroke, and French took over. The sudden promotion woke him out of his stupor, and the clouds lifted from his mind. He regained the energy and focus for which he was famous, and worked tirelessly, making up for lost time. His career, stuck in neutral for a season, got a jolt of high-octane fuel and surged ahead.

But even though he recovered, and in fact prospered without the potential complication of a mistress to worry about, French never forgot Samantha. And his hatred for Muslims, which had begun the moment he learned of her death, grew in his
soul, fed and nurtured by his grief until it became a viper. Islamic terrorists took his love, the same way they killed thousands of Americans on 9/11, the same way they murdered innocents the world over. In his mind, they were the greatest threat to U.S. security on the planet. He knew that if he were ever in a position to eradicate their stench, to destroy them completely, he wouldn’t hesitate. For America.

For Samantha.

6
9

They had reached I-495 -- the Washington, D.C. beltway -- and were nearing the turnoff onto Route 1, the highway into College Park, when Max was finally able to get a call through to Tony’s Mom. At this point, Tony didn’t see much reason to withhold their purpose from her. If things went wrong, after all, who knows if he’d see her again? He could easily end up in jail, or dead. If this was the last time he’d ever talk to her, he wanted to tell her the truth. She deserved as much.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Tony! Thank God! I’ve been worried sick about you! Are you all right?” His mother screamed first, then started crying. At that, Tony felt his own tears well up. This had been terribly hard on her. He’d known it all along, but it still pained him to hear the relief, mixed with fear, in her sobs.

“I’m fine, Mom. I’m here with Rick, in a car. Also, Scarlett, that girl I went out with, is with us, too.” Tony could only assume his
Mom heard him, since she continued to cry.

“Listen, Mom, about what Rick told you...”

Her crying subsided to sniffles. “What?”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly true. You know, about us having gone out for Spring Break.”

“It wasn’t? So where are you? What are you doing?”

“We’re uh, we’re...” Tony suddenly realized: Where do I begin?
How
do I begin? And he knew he couldn’t fully explain. “Um, you know how the Internet went down, then the power and all that?”

“Yes...”

“Well, we’re trying to fix that. We’re in Maryland, going to the University of Maryland, where we think my phone can fix the root servers that run the Internet.”

Silence on the other end for a few seconds. “I don’t understand. You’re in Maryland?”

“Yes. We think the phone I found can fix the Internet. We just have to plug it in to a special computer there, and it will be able to fix what’s wrong with the Internet.”

Tony could tell his
Mom was trying to work it out in her mind. She needed to take things like this slowly.

She spoke cautiously now. “Tony, are you in danger?”

How to answer that? “Well, I wouldn’t say danger, exactly...”

“You are! I knew it! Oh, Tony, can’t you...?”

“No, Mom, we have to try and do this ourselves. We know what to do. Other people want this phone, and I guess there could be folks who want to try and stop us, but I think it’ll be OK.”

“Can’t you call the police and have them take care of it?”

Rick gave a hoot, drowning out Tony’s Mom. “Route 1 South! We’ll be there in less than 20 minutes!” He slowed to take the exit, then hit the accelerator again, channeling his inner NASCAR.

A shot of adrenaline burst through Tony’s system. “We could
call the police, but I don’t think there’s enough time before we’re there, and they might not even use the phone if we gave it to them. They might just take it, or arrest us, or something.” He didn’t add
and they might take Max away, and I just can’t bear that thought.

“So, it sounds like there’s nothing I can do to talk you out of this.”

“I don’t think so, Mom. We’re almost there now. We’ll be fine.” He wasn’t sure of that at all, but knew his Mom needed to hear it.

In the background, he could hear the neighbors arguing
, and decided to change the subject. “How are you doing through all this?”

“OK, I guess. The store’s been closed since the power went out, of course, so I haven’t been working. But I actually don’t mind a little vacation.”

“Have you had enough to eat?”

“Yeah. There’s not much left, mind you. I’ve been eating every scrap of food in the house, including
year-old crackers, and all the canned stuff we had, some of it older than the crackers. If you were here, we wouldn’t have had enough. But I only eat like twice a day anyway, you know. I can make do with tuna fish and Spam.” Tony thought his Mom was just being brave; her tone sounded a little too casual. He suspected she was very hungry.

“Well, that’s good. And now that the power’s back, they’ll open up the
7 Eleven again, and you can get back to work.”

“That’s what Roy told me. Said I could start again tomorrow. We’ll have to do things differently, of course, with the Internet still down, but we’ll figure it out.” She coughed, and he could hear the roughness in her voice. It got like that when she was drinking and smoking a lot. Tony didn’t blame her; people
did what they had to do to get through something like this.

They chatted another couple of minutes about minutia -- the bickeri
ng neighbors, Bart and Juanita, were worse than ever, now that they were both home from work --  until they saw a sign that they were approaching the University of Maryland, College Park Campus. “I’ve got to go now. We’re here.” He paused. Would these be the last words he spoke to her?

“
Mom?”

“Yes, honey?”

“I love you. You’ve been such a great mother.”

He could hear his
Mom’s breath catch. “Don’t talk like that, Tony. I’ll see you soon. Y’hear? I love you too, baby. My baby...” she trailed off and began to sob again. Tony hung up before he did the same.

70

Within a half-hour of the call
Tony made to his Mom, an analyst in a windowless room at the bottom of the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, picked up his phone. The NSA’s spying equipment had caught enough red-flag words -- “Internet”, “root servers”, “University of Maryland” -- that, when used in the same conversation, caused it to send an alert to the analyst. The analyst, immediately suspicious, listened to the entire call. Some kid named Tony was telling his Mom that he and some friends were taking a phone to the University of Maryland, and using it to try and restore the Internet.

He whistled. “Ho
-lee cow.” Phone in hand, he dialed the highest superior for which he had a number. That superior dialed his superior. That superior dialed the White House directly.

Within eight minutes
of the analyst’s call, three helicopters full of Marines were on their way to the University of Maryland’s Computer and Space Sciences Building, campus building No. 224.

7
1

Schnell had given the headphones to Bass as soon as he heard the boy start talking to his mother on Tony’s phone. Bass listened attentively, his bald head suddenly glistening with sweat as his heart beat faster. This was it. He took off his headphones and made his way past his soldiers to the front of the helicopter.

“They’re at the school. How much longer until we land?” he shouted
to the pilot over the noise of the rotors.

“Maybe 20, 25 minutes. We’re close.”

“Are you full out?”

“Yeah.”

He then sat next to Schnell. “You’re sure you know where they are on campus?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I’ve been there several times for conferences. It’s the Computer and Space Sciences Building,
next to several sports fields for football and baseball. It should be easy to spot from the air.”

“Fantastic,” Bass said. “So we can land right on the fields.”

“Exactly. All we have to do is cross a road.”

Bass turned to the back of the chopper and readied his men. “This is it, boys. When we
close this loop, the Internet’s gone. They’ll try to rebuild it in the future, but we’ll stay one step ahead of them with that phone.” He raised his arms and shouted.

“Victory!”

They returned the gesture, shouting as one. “Victory!”