Chapter Five: The Missing Four Minutes

“Impossible,” Wancheng said. “Unless they didn't forge signatures. They reused authorization tokens from genuine settlements.” Zhou inspected an update supplied by a vendor called Mirrorbridge Technology. The new offline-retry function cached bank tokens when a connection failed and resubmitted them later. A token should work once. In Farland's private version, the retry limit had been changed to three. The first attempt paid the real merchant. The second created an internal paid record while routing money into the 427 shadow accounts. The third remained pending to conceal the imbalance. After daily closing, the shadows transferred the cash into a money-market fund controlled by Constant Order.