Chapter Five: The Missing Four Minutes

Farland's server room was a hundred times cleaner than Zhou Jibai's shop and a hundred times less convenient. The technology director provided mirrored data but no production access. From a folding chair, Zhou aligned two months of merchant withdrawals, driver payments, bank receipts, and vehicle records to the second. “Fraud hates clocks,” he said. “You can invent an amount and copy an identifier, but four independent systems can't tell the same lie.” At midnight they found the first fracture. Every day from 11:56 p.m. to midnight, Farland performed end-of-day netting and generated no external query records. Bank receipts nonetheless showed thousands of settlements during those four minutes. Over two months, they totaled 1.18 billion yuan.