The Paws of Prejudice
The curiosity, the cat and the killer! (Ep 3)
Mike Ehrmantraut is an indispensable figure from the Breaking Bad series. Every powerful government has to deal with ample instances of breaking laws which they invented themselves. People like Mike, Saul, work round the clock in devising ways to wipe its own shit and not leave any trace. Of course, the Chinese government needed more than one person, and they had a fleet of Mikes applying their skills for this cause.
It had become a routine for the government to find loopholes in the judicial system and use it to their advantage. The Chinese government operated an undercover cohort, called “The Paws of Prejudice” a full-time organization deputed to discover/invent ways to find flaws in the constitution, bend law, influence political decisions and cover transgressions without leaving a trace. The Paws of Prejudice abbreviated “The Pope” in mockery, operated in such stealth and agility like the paws of a cat. Planting fake evidence, alibis, getting rid of witnesses, laundering, kidnaps and in extreme case, assassinations were a part of the job descriptions of the people employed in The Pope. They cleansed the government’s filth operating covertly behind the walls of a detergent company. The sales unit of Zhipu was a fake entity which wash1 the Pope. People were recruited only on a refer-invite basis after extreme levels of screening and rigorous talent check. Li Xiao and his team’s responsibility was to find every possible loophole in planned plots and close all such gaps. Their pay grade was based on how well they tackle unforeseen situations which could be anything from hiding a dead body, burning down a crime scene, dealing with a blood-stained carpet and even engineering sly political strategies like constitutional amendments to control freedom of speech, planting riots for benefits, enforcing regulations on religious practices and educational curriculum. The job description being so precarious, employees were aptly remunerated with pompous perks, benefits, and copious money, especially the once involving less violence, less visibility, and minimal collateral damage.
Li’s team was not about action, it was more about the reaction, in outsmarting a situation. They spent many hours of their day mostly investing brain cycles crunching all the information to first identify all formidable evidence left behind in a plot and then wipe them to debunk them. Li started as a 22-year-old intern in the company, where they gave him a small project of handling a student union election and ensure the government’s favorite candidate wins at one the most coveted schools run by the government. While his peers suggested the conventional approach of kidnapping or locking down a few voters from the opposition, or somehow making sure they do not vote, Li used a radical yet effective approach — Sympathy. Li burned down the car of his candidate two days before the election. He carefully executed this endeavor to ensure that the Pope is not traced back from the fire. He began his plan a few weeks before and planted a remote-controlled spark plug in the fuel tank. On ignition, as the car burnt, so did the modified spark plug. Everything was reduced to ashes. Li got this published in the local newspaper along with the picture of the car, and made it look like a gory act. He subtly made people think it was (or could have been) done by the opposition and swayed many sympathy votes in his direction. It made his candidate win by a solid margin. Li was hired with solid pay for his creativity!
During October 2022, one of the key government officials was involved in a gruesome human trafficking scandal involving women and children. There were key pieces of evidence and the Pope was hired to get the official absolved. Despite punctilious efforts by criminal lawyers, all attempts had failed and the case was tightly hinged on the testimony of a key eye witness. The Pope decided to blackmail the eye witness using his family as bait. They decided to kidnap the witness’ brother and Li was taken along as an assistant to ensure there is no trace of evidence left. While they were dragging the unconscious witness’ brother, Li noticed someone open his door and peek at what was going on. He was totally against the “kill/get him too” idea suggested by his peer and assured he would take care of it. He quickly called his drug-dealer-friend who lived close by and gave her instructions. In fifteen minutes the girl was hovering near the witness’ witness’ house and made him notice her. She laid a sexual bait and offered him PCP, a drug which induces paranoia for a few hours and the person is out of his mind. She slept with him and left in the morning way before he woke up. Li knew that the dude will be interrogated, but he advised his criminal lawyer to get a medical check done with the premise that, there were drug dealers near his door during the night. Based on inebriation, the testimony was annulled! Any act involving less humanly violence and destruction garnered a lot of appreciation in the Pope and Li received all the limelight. Li knew about the specific drug and the law very well, his internet voracity made him a bank of information and he was smart to recall it at right moments. Li was passive dangerous and this earned him one of the quickest of promotions.
Li’s major breakthrough which won him cardinal recognition was when his idea in 2028 saved the government from being overthrown for the next term. An opposing internal unit had planned a detailed deposition of the current government. They had successfully dug up and publicized many proofs citing the government’s involvement in high profile law transgressions. A coup was imminent. Li and his team figured that the only way to win (or avoid losing), is if there are no elections. They gathered from the Chinese constitution that “in the case when the country is involved in a war, any impending immediate election could be advanced, or canceled in the light of public safety being the topmost priority”. Li was a voracious reader and an aware person. He knew that elections were due next year in the Philippines and the current government there would not be able to retain power, given its miserable efforts for curbing drugs. The president of the Philippines had issued shoot-at-sight orders even if there was a small suspicion of a drug activity, which had caused hundreds of innocent people needlessly losing lives. While he believed that this was the price to be paid to put an end to drug abuse, the numbers told a different story. Drug circulation had only increased in the Philippines and people had accepted that their president was a psychopath. The Philippines President would have needed something consequential to hold on to his government too. Although historically the two countries had not been in good terms over a disputed trade route in the South China Sea, Li felt that they could use each other for a mutual benefit for once. The seed of Li’s idea sounded to be a good ray of hope for his manager and a meeting was set up with higher levels of Pope. Li suggested to stage a fake mini-war with the Philippines and give them access to the disputed trade route in the South China Sea. It would legally keep China involved in a war, which they can use to avoid election for a term. It would give the Philippines government good marketing that they did not buckle under the pressure of the mighty Chinese government and defended their route solidly. The Philippines in return would surrender Batan and Babuyan — a group of abandoned, washed off islands with dilapidated ports, which were now retreats to drug-lords since a few years. The Chinese government wanted to use these as a base to fend off the US navy who had been exercising their unwarranted authority to limit sea-route accessibility over the Pacific via their bases at Guam and Palau which were just a few hundred miles from the eastern coast of China. Over the weeks, the team came up with a plan to instigate and stage a mini-war and eventually sign a win-win treaty as an accord for peace.
The plan was made as full proof possible and discussed between the Chinese president and the head of Pope. The Philippines president was invited and an understanding was established. Even though hit by obstacles, both countries succeeded in retaining their governments eventually. Li was made the head of a whole new division and his already glamorous salary rose tenfold.
The employees of Pope were instructed to always access information (private or public) via the corporate private network, and breaking this policy had deleterious outcomes. In extreme cases, when employees needed public information and corp access was not available they were instructed to use certified public VPNs while connecting to the internet. Li was very astute about using his resources. But human perfection is always a myth. While working on one of the recent cases, he was shunting continuously to remote places and was finding it hard to manage with limited connectivity for months. While choosing a VPN he found one which had better connectivity but was not very popular and not certified by Pope. And since he was only accessing public information and that too behind the walls of an incognito browser and temporarily for two months, he was convinced it would be concealed and safe.
Meanwhile, Ying Yu merely knew that Li was some marketing guy interested in murders, plots, escapes, and chemicals — keywords suggested by the model based on his browsing history (incognito included). He had found that Li had dug up old public information on criminal cases of heist, kidnaps, murders, arsons, etc. His conjecture of Li being a thriller buff was thrown out of the window when he discovered that these searches were made in incognito. “Why would he want to hide it?” he questioned. Like any data engineer, Ying Yu decided to find a pattern and looked up all people in the model who had high weights for topics in this domain. As expected cops, lawyers and some journalists showed up. Yu filtered people based only on their data from incognito mode and redid the lookup. He found only two people. One more person named Deming also had similar searches in his incognito history. Yu’s jaw dropped when he discovered that even Deming was also an employee at Zhipu. Yu grew very suspicious about Zhipu. He disabled incognito tracking immediately and started scraping information about Zhipu, its ties with the government and more about Li and Deming.
