The Last Network - Chapter 45
Layer Fake
Paolo watched the video. Two Chinese men were in a warehouse. Behind them were boxes labeled Prada, Gucci, Fendi, Dolce. The older man owned the place and merchandise. The younger man was new in town. In Mandarin, he called the older man uncle and asked him how the business worked. They talked and loaded boxes into the back of a white Toyota pickup. The conversation was very casual, and their tone was familiar. Uncle lit a cigarette and explained to the younger man how everything he saw here was fake. It all came from China. Perfect replicas. Sure, some buyers could tell the difference, but not the Nigerians. They were unsophisticated. More interested in what the label read than checking the craftwork. No one here understood proper stitching or what the hologram was supposed to look like.
These people are idiots, animals. He went on. No one ever asked for serial numbers or called to authenticate merchandise. He held a bag up. This cost me $100. I sell it for $1000. The store sells it for $2000. Never a complaint, never a question.
We Chinese will own Nigeria in another decade, he said.
Paolo watched the video looking for anything out of place. He kept pausing and Googling. The license plate was right. The power sockets looked correct. The boxes looked right. It felt authentic enough for the job. He turned to his vendor, Mack, who also played the younger man in the video.
“Do Chinese people speak differently in Nigeria?” Paolo asked.
“How the fuck should I know? What I do know is that when people from the mainland talk to each other, they all speak like they’re back home. Doesn’t matter where you are.”
“How’d you get the outside to look like Nigeria?”
Mack turned and looked out the back of the warehouse. He was staring at an alleyway in Downey, California. There was a chain link fence in the background and railroad tracks past that.
“Dude, you’re in Los Angeles. The FX and props were the easiest part of the video.”
Paolo reached into his bag and pulled out a manila envelope with $5000 in it. He handed it to the man who gave him a USB stick in return. In an hour, Paolo would VPN into a Nigerian IP address and post the video on YouTube and Reddit. After that, he’d send $500 to someone in Bangladesh who’d make sure that the video generated tens of thousands of views and upvotes overnight.
When he woke in the morning, the video had gone viral. In Lagos it was 3:00 pm on Sunday and anger was running high. Paolo put the second part of his plan into action. He backdoored into Peared and pulled up the administrator console, God Mode. There were 10,000 Pairs in Nigeria, most of them in Lagos. He was on the hunt for several Eyes he had been monitoring. They were merchants who used runners as Hands to conduct business around the city. Instead of having to fight through traffic for meeting after meeting, these guys had figured out they could buy their flunkies AR glasses and send them out in their place.
He found Ibrahim who was a distributor in Yaba. Paolo put his AR glasses on and faced a concrete wall that showed nothing. He took control of Ibrahim’s feed and connected them together.
“Ibrahim, this is a friend.” Paolo said in a garbled voice.
“I don’t know you. How did you do that?”
“Don’t worry about that. Tonight at 10:00 pm, I want you to click on this link. You’ll see live footage of Tunji Awojobi Street in VI. Two diesel tankers are going to explode on opposite ends of the block. All the store windows will be blown out. Police and fire will take their time getting there. Have your runners loot the stores.”
Paolo dropped the feed. He repeated this process eight more times. Some would do it, others would not, but they would get the word out. There would be looting.
He then found his two Evil Eyes. These men he had paid very close attention to. He had paired with both of them earlier in the week and sent 50,000 NGN to their mobiles as a sign of good faith. They were tasked with finding Hands that would steal the trucks and put them at each end of the block. The first had paired with twenty people already that day. He was searching for a sucker. The other was online but quiet. He was connected to a Hand. Paolo opened their feed. The Hand was sitting in the cab of a truck already.
Good. He liked efficient sociopaths.
He’d check back in just before 10:00 pm. He still needed to get someone to puncture each tanker and light them up. Paolo was going to be the Evil Eye that handled that job. He started looking online for someone who had a motorbike and was really pissed off.