Internet Kill Switch (14 page)

Scarlett gasped. “Are you sure it was him?”

Rick nodded. “He and another couple of guys were checking out the Hummer. Bald guy, long beard, isn’t that right, Tony?”

“For sure,” Tony said, his pulse picking up again.

“They started walking into the hospital -- after putting their guns back in their SUV. I guess they figured they’d get busted if the hospital had a scanner set up.”

Scarlett looked
out the back window, terrified of seeing Bass’s SUV behind them. Chased, once more, by crackpots with guns. Why was she stupid enough to get involved in something like this again? Then she looked at Tony and remembered when, just a few days before, he handed her a napkin in a restaurant and cried because a guy ditched her.

That’s why.

“I assume Bass has been checking local hospitals, knowing that Tony had been shot before escaping,” Max said.

Rick poured on even more speed, making Scarlett nervous. Tony didn’t mind; he was more nervous about Bass tracking him down
than Rick’s driving.

Rick
kept checking his rearview mirror. “Now, Tony, it’s time to talk about what they used Max to do.”

3
8

Bass found the guards who were supposed to kill Tony. He didn’t care that one of them, Ted Kline, had lost a brother in the attack.

“You let him go!” he roared. The guards cowered.

“Well, we thought it was more important to get back here,” Kline said in a small, apologetic voice.

Bass considered shooting both of them on the spot, then dismissed it. He’d already lost enough people today, and he couldn’t spare them.

“But you’re sure you hit him, right?”

“Oh
, yeah,” Lefty Pearson said. “He ain’t gonna be walking anywhere soon.”

That confirmed what Bass thought he saw -- Carver limping to the truck, with some
skinny chick helping him.

“Alright, so here’s what’s going to happen now. We’re going to start checking local hospitals -- if that boy’s bleeding bad, they’ll need to take him in
somewhere.” Ted and Lefty looked eager to help, although Bass suspected it was more to defuse Bass’s anger than a desire to get the kid. But that worked for him; terror was a wonderful motivator.

Three days later, Bass and his men pulled into the parking lot of the hospital in Searcy. He knew they were going to have to give up the chase soon if they couldn’t find Carver; there was too much to do back at the compound. They checked all the local hospitals first, then widened their search.

Suddenly,
Bass’s head snapped around. Bingo!

B
lack Hummer.

They pulled up next to it, guns drawn,
and jumped out. Bass examined the outside of the truck. Bullet indentation, most likely, in the rear gate. To make sure, he went around to the passenger side and shone a flashlight across to the driver’s side door.

There: a
hole, made by a bullet from his gun.

The three men
dumped their guns back in the Range Rover and headed toward the hospital at a fast trot.

“You guys know what to do, right?” Bass said as
they approached the glass doors.

“Right,” Lefty answered. He and Ted slowed down to fall behind Bass, making it look like they weren’t with
him.

Bass entered the lobby, the glass doors whispering open and closed. A few seconds later, Ted and Lefty came behind,
pretending to have a quiet argument. Bass walked to the front desk and smiled at the receptionist.

“Hi, I’m here to see a friend of mine. Tony Carver?”

The receptionist smiled back.

“I’ll have to check. Our computer’s down, as you know. We’re doing everything on paper now.”

“Yeah, it’s crazy what’s going on,” Bass said. Behind him, the argument between Ted and Lefty got louder. The receptionist looked up at them.

“Could you two please keep it down?” she said. The men
stepped a little further from the desk, then continued the argument.

“When would he have come in?”

“About three days ago,” Bass said.

She folded a few more pages back on the clipboard. “No, I don’t see a Tony Carver. Are you sure you’ve got the right hospital?”

Bass looked at Ted and Lefty and gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. At once, the two men started yelling at each other. The receptionist scowled and put the clipboard down.

“Excuse me.” She got up and walked over to the
shouting men.

Bass picked up the clipboard and flipped back
over the previous few days. He didn’t find Carver’s name, but he hadn’t really expected to -- he only hoped they’d be that stupid. Instead, he started looking for the types of injuries people were admitted for. The list was long, as it was in hospitals nationwide -- thanks to him.

A
s the receptionist tried to talk some sense into the two fools screaming at each other, he found what he wanted:

Jimmy Harvey

Admitted 4/11

Laceration right leg

Room 319

Bass motioned to Lefty, who saw him. Immediately, Lefty realized he was being an idiot, and ended the argument
. Ted shook his hand and told him the first round tonight was on him. The receptionist smiled, glad that her psychology degree finally paid some dividends; she’d helped these two angry men see reason and work things out, rather than resort to typically aggressive male behavior and start punching each other. She returned to her post behind the counter.

Bass wait
ed on the elevator, soon joined by Ted and Lefty. The doors closed and the elevator made its slow climb to the third floor.

If they
’d gotten on the elevator 30 seconds later, they would have seen Rick open the door to the stairs and scan the lobby, looking for Bass and his henchmen.

L
ess than a minute later, Rick, Scarlett and Tony were in the Hummer.

As Bass and his gang passed the nurse’s station, they were stopped by Nurse Sandy.

“Can I help you?”

Bass spoke. “We’re just here to check on our friend in 319.”

Sandy looked them over. “I’m sorry, you can’t go in without a visitor’s pass.”

The men ignored her.

“Stop right there, or I’ll call security!” she shouted. They started running toward the room.

Bass charged into 319. Empty. He ran to the window. The black Hummer was pulling out of the parking lot, heading toward highway 67/167, which would take them nearly anywhere. Dammit!

He shot out of the room, Ted and Lefty on his heels. They bowled over the 73-year-old security guard
coming their way and were soon out of the hospital. They piled in the Rover and took off, hitting three cars on their way out of the lot. Bass had to get that phone back. Bass
would
get that phone back.

Everything depended on it.

39

“Where are we going?” Tony asked as Rick continued to scream down the highway.

“Memphis,” Scarlett answered. “To the airport there.”

“Are we flying somewhere?”

“Yes. We’re going to Baltimore/Washington
International Airport, just outside of D.C. It’s the closest major airport to the University of Maryland. That’s where we want to end up.”

“I don’t get it,” Tony said.

“Let’s back up a bit,” Max said. “You need the whole story. Rick, hand me to Tony.”

Rick passed the phone back. Tony looked at the display. “Now I’ll open a browser,” Max said.

Tony watched. A blank screen came up with the words “You are not connected to the Internet.”

“So?” Tony said. “I get that
on my laptop, whenever I lose wi-fi.”

“But now,” said Max, “Everyone in the world is getting the same thing, and has been for
three days.”

Tony looked at Max’s display. He tried to connect to Twitter. Nothing. Facebook. Nothing.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“It’s dead,” Max said simply.

“What’s dead?” He looked at the browser, and understanding came. “You mean...the Internet?”

“Yup. Dead as
a computer at the bottom of a lake.”

“You mean, like all of it?”

“All of it,” Scarlett said. “It’s been out since the day we rescued you.”

“But how?”

“Me,” Max said.

“You? You killed the Internet?”

“Yup. I’m John Wilkes Booth, and I made the Internet my personal Abe Lincoln. Bullet to the head.”

Tony looked at Scarlett. She nodded.

Tony didn’t doubt they were telling the truth, but he still struggled to grasp the concept. The Internet had always been there, would always be there. It was like a mountain. He couldn’t imagine it not being there.

“How do you bring down the whole Internet?”

“Through a reflective DNS amplification distributed denial-of-service attack that crashed the Internet’s system of root servers,” Max said unhelpfully.

“Um, I
know you were using words, but that’s about all I understood.”

Max sighed. “I know. It gets complicated, so I’ll break it down as simply as possible. There are 13 server clusters that run the Domain Name System, which is shortened to DNS. Those are the servers that know where to send a Web browser when it asks for the site www.ebay.com, or www.amazon.com, or www.weather.com.”

“So it sort of acts like a map…” asked Tony, still working the edges of understanding.

“In a way, yes,” said Max. “These DNS servers
know the map of the Internet, and act kind of like guides, telling computers that ask where to find websites in the cyber world. In reality, there are hundreds of servers that have this map, but they all ultimately go back to these 13 groups.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Rick said to Tony. “I’ve heard this like three times now, and I still don’t get a lot of it.” He slowed the Hummer a bit as they reached the little tow
n of Bald Knob, Arkansas. He took a ramp south off the highway onto U.S. 64, which quickly turned southeast. He picked up speed again; Tony saw the speedometer hit 80. After that, he stopped looking.

“OK, DNS. What happens next?”

Max continued. “If those servers get overloaded with requests – if too many computers ask them for information at once – they shut down. The computers making the requests of the DNS servers get ‘denied’ service, which is why it’s called a ‘denial of service’ attack.”

“Gotcha,” Tony said.

“All of these groups of servers have the same lists of information – the same ‘maps’ – so if one server cluster goes down, the others simply take over and handle the requests. Then the one that goes down gets updated with any new information once it’s brought back online.”

The Hummer roared through the flat fields of east Arkansas, only slowing when they went through a town like Augusta, which they hit after a few minutes.

“So there’s backups built in,” Tony said, preferring to focus on the conversation rather than watch the scenery fly by. He occasionally looked out the back, hoping he didn’t see any cars chasing after them. He had no idea how much of a head start they had on Bass.

“
It’s more precisely called redundancy, but that’s the idea,” Max said. “Now, if all 13 server groups could be shut down at once, you could take down the Internet. Which is what I did.”

“Has
it ever happened before? If a hacker could do that, it would be like winning the Super Bowl for them,” Tony said.

“Yes, it has been tried,” Max said. “The most famous hacking group
in the world, called Anonymous, tried to do it in 2012. The attack that had the most impact happened in October 2002, when 9 of the 13 clusters were hit hard. And there have been other attacks. But no one’s ever succeeded.”

“Until now,” Tony said, a shiver going down his back.
“Because no one’s ever had you before.”

“
Right. I know exactly where to hit the DNS root clusters, along with how and when.”

“But didn’t you try to stop
Bass?” Tony asked.

“Of course I did. I wouldn’t purposely do something like that,
” Max said, with a tiny bit of hurt in his voice. Tony marveled again that a phone could react so – humanly – to the context of the conversation. Those kinds of subtleties were what separated Max from all other voice-enabled devices.

“Then what happened?”

Max spat it out. “Schnell, that rat-bastard, got root.”

“Root?”

“Root access to my operating system. He was able to crack a low-level password that gave him control to do what was necessary to force me to bring down the Internet.”

Rick broke in. “We should be at Memphis
International Airport in about a half-hour.”

The world sped by the window. “So what will the Internet being down do to the world?” Tony asked.

“No one’s sure,” Max said. “There’s no way to know how this will all work out, but we’ve already seen some of it. I have a feeling it could get really ugly. So much of what the world does is connected to the Internet.”

“I know one way it’s had an effect,” Rick said. “I’ve only been offline for
three days, and I’m going through serious withdrawal without espn.com and YouTube, the two main things I use. It’s worse than when I quit cigarettes.”

“You smoked?” Scarlett
asked. “How old were you when you started?”

“Nine,” Rick said. “Stole a pack of my dad’s Marlboros. Worst thing I ever tasted
. I threw up for 20 minutes afterward. So, naturally, I had to light up another one. Then another. That’s all it took.”

“When did you quit?”

“When I was 13. Only because my Mom caught me and said she’d take away my PlayStation if I didn’t stop that minute. Probably the only thing that could’ve done it.”

“Nine years old,” Scarlett said. “Wow. I have to agree, though, on the withdrawal. I’ve been feeling it, too. The worst for me is no Facebook updates, no
Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest. I didn’t realize how addicted I was.”

Tony, getting a little frustrated with the conversation detour, wanted to get back on track.
“I still don’t know why Bass would do this. How would knocking out the Internet help him?”

“I heard enough of their talk
while Schnell was working on me to get a pretty good idea of Bass’s mindset. The guy hates technology. Hates it. He wants to turn America back into some kind of pre-Industrial Revolution society. Almost like the Unabomber.”

“Who?” Scarlett asked, before Tony could.

“The Unabomber was a guy named Ted Kaczynski. He was a kook who also hated technology. To spread his ‘message’, he bombed people involved in technology for almost 20 years before he was caught. He killed three people and injured 23.”

“Wow,” Tony said. “Sounds familiar.”

“Yup. The Unabomber lived in a primitive cabin in Montana without electricity or running water. Fertilized his garden with his own poop.”

“
Oh, gross!” Scarlett said.

“Interestingly, he
’s locked up in the same prison Bass spent a decade in. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Bass came out, he hatched this plot.”

“You think they knew each other?” Tony said.

“I’d say it’s pretty likely.”

“We just hit
Route 55,” Rick said, turning south. “Couple of minutes away.”

“Well, I think I understand at least enough of what happened,” Tony said. “So why are we going to Maryland?”

“To re-start the Internet,” Max said.

“How?”

“One of the root server clusters is there, at the University of Maryland. If we can get in and plug me into one of the servers, I can hopefully restore the Internet.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, pretty sure,” Max said.

“I was hoping for more than that,” Tony said.

“I’m afraid it’s the best I can do,” Max said. “I don’t know how much damage has been done, or what I’ll find once I’m inside. But I think that, given enough time, I can fix the problem with that cluster. Then that information will get automatically spread to the other server clusters, and things should start working again.”

“He has to be physically plugged in, though,” Scarlett said.

“Why?” Tony said. “He didn’t have to be plugged in before.”

“
Before, the Internet was working,” Max said. “I had network access. Those networks are all gone now. I need be attached to a server this time. A root server; it’s an authoritative computer that other servers will recognize and pull updates from.”

“Why the one
in Maryland?”

“It’s the closest one.”

“Makes sense. It shouldn’t take long to get there on a plane, should it?”

“Not long. Maybe a few hours,” Scarlett said. “It’s a little less than a thousand miles.”

“Yeah,” Rick said. “With any luck, things’ll be back to normal by tonight.”

They pulled into the short-term parking lot of Memphis International Airport. What they saw when they got out didn’t encourage them. To start with, they didn’t see planes filling the sky overhead.

The airport seemed mostly deserted
, and there were few cars in the lot. They entered the main terminal and found more of the same: a few people walking around, but no one working at the airline counters; no security lines; no people wheeling suitcases around or talking on cellphones.

One thing they saw a lot of that they didn’t expect were airport security officers, Memphis cops and some Tennessee state troopers. In fact, they seemed to outnumber the civilians.

“I was afraid of this,” Max said.

“Holy crap,” Rick said. They hadn’t
been looking around more than 30 seconds when a security officer approached them.

“Can I help you folks?”

Scarlett spoke first. “Well, officer, we were hoping to get a flight out, but it looks like that’s not going to happen.”

The officer gave them a curious look.
“Uh, no. Once the Internet was knocked out, all flights were grounded. The airlines rely on the Internet for just about everything: reservations, check-in, seating assignments, work schedules for employees. Not to mention the most serious problem; air traffic control. It would just be too dangerous to fly, not to mention impossible from a logistical standpoint.”

“Is it all out as long as the Internet’s down?” Rick asked.

The officer looked around. “I hope not. They’re trying to figure out how to do things the way they used to -- you know, using paper for everything. But that could take awhile, since there are no procedures for that anymore.”

“I guess it’s like this all over the country,” Scarlett said.

The officer gave them another look, this one a bit more suspicious than the last. “Yeah. Don’t you guys watch TV or read the papers? No one’s been talking about anything else. Every news outlet is covering it nonstop.”

“We’ve been -- out of touch for a bit,” Tony said.

“Well, for the airlines at least, it’s kind of like what happened after 9-11, although you kids may not remember much about that. All flights were grounded for three days, and most flights didn’t resume ‘til several days after that. It was a mess.”

Scarlett noticed a state trooper eyeing them. “Why are there so many cops here?”

“Couple of reasons. Since we don’t know what’s going on, there’s a fear it could be terrorist-related, and airports are a natural terrorist target. Second is that there are starting to be reports of societal breakdown here and there. Looting’s broken out in a few cities. Security’s up everywhere.”

They thanked the security officer and got back in their car. Tony scanned the parking lot for any signs of cars that might be following them or looking suspicious.