The Last Network - Chapter 63
Network Control
The just right job fell into Paolo’s lap. He thanked Monica and watched as she walked over to the edge of the deck. The back of her feet popped out of her heels; she stretched her legs and pulled herself higher to look down into the canyon below. Still no sign of Kendra and Malcolm. She sighed and wandered off, tired of being up in the hills, ready to get moving on their next assignment. Time was short, and she valued hers like no one else.
Paolo thumbed through the materials—Imran Malik’s Wikipedia entry, news articles from Dawn and Geo, a summary of the political situation in Karachi. All useful background, but the why did not really matter. He was searching for the specs, the requirements that would dictate the work.
Paolo was a How man, not a Why man.
He found them held together in a clip, one of those large black and silver ones common on legal files. Flipping through, he saw page after page of Peared profiles. Glad that the bulk of the file was data and not asks, he went back to the beginning and started to read.
Ten minutes later, a shadow fell over him. Monica was back from wherever. He knew she was exasperated by the way she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Malcolm and Kendra were clearly not here.
“Yes?” Paolo asked.
“We are going on thirty minutes now.”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“If he was working late that’d be one thing, but he’s fucking her late.”
“How do you know?”
“He called. He said he’d be here in twenty. They are still at her hotel. Forty minutes in this traffic. I could hear the shower running.”
“Wasn’t that just us a few days ago?”
“Yes, but no one was waiting on me.”
He watched her storm off. His mind returned to the task at hand. It didn’t matter to him whether they were on time or not. Even if they were here, he’d need time to run through the job. He had to think of edge cases and failure points. Actions make ripples in the pond. Those ripples collide. Sometimes they quietly cancel each other, other times they push together and become a larger force which then needs to be accounted for.
Their client wanted Paolo to act as a controller of the Peared network so that Imran Malik, the People’s Lion, could march from his party’s storefront headquarters in Clifton to a rally in the Defense neighborhood. Malik was a rising star who lacked the muscle and infrastructure of the entrenched PQP party. Overseas organizers wanted to pair with Hands on the ground to bolster their confidence, give them the courage to march, and get Malik to his destination. Paolo couldn’t tell if that task mattered more than the inverse, which was keeping PQP operatives from forming Pairs.
Either way, it was a simple, but laborious, job. Karachi was a big market for them. There’d be thousands of users online. He had to create a one-mile radius around Malik while also connecting the attached list of Eyes and preventing others from pairing. He wouldn’t need to talk to any of them. He didn’t need to dictate any actions. He just needed to grant their client exclusive control of the network near Malik.
It could be done. The tricky part was in the reporting. If he was blocking Eyes, they could file error reporting. A couple thousand of those concentrated in one locality would trigger alerts. If something happened that day, there would be evidence that someone was tampering with the system. The alerts wouldn’t point to anything further, but they would stand as a starting clue.
The risk was acceptable to Paolo. He’d be gone after this. Besides it was Karachi. The Pakistani government routinely shut the entire internet off and had some serious injection capabilities. Everyone would view this as an internal matter and leave it at that.
Happy with the solution, he was ready for the briefing. Malcolm and Kendra still hadn’t showed.
It was Paolo’s turn to be annoyed.