At Risk of Winning (The Max Masterson Series Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

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.

u 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