For a partnership arrangement you declined. In the course of that approach, they would have provided due diligence documentation about themselves, corporate structure, significant transactions, key acquisitions. He paused. Do you still have what they sent you? The silence stretched long enough that Cole heard a car pass on the access road outside.
I have what my legal team compiled during the review process, Victoria said finally, which included background research on their significant acquisitions. Another pause. I didn't connect it to the prototype investigation at the time. But you might have something relevant. I might?
She said. Have something relevant. She looked at him with an expression he was still learning to read. Something between frustration and a kind of respect that came specifically from being outmaneuvered by someone you'd underestimated. Cole hadn't intended to outmaneuver her.
He'd just followed the line of evidence to where it went. I'll have my legal team pull the file, she said. It'll take a few days. We have 10 days until the formal report. Then we have time.
They looked at each other across the workbench and Cole thought, not for the first time and with the same slight discomfort he had every time, that Victoria Hale was a great deal more complicated than the woman who'd called his auction purchase the dumbest of the year in a Nevada parking lot. That woman had been performing a version of herself, the way people did in public situations. What was in the workshop was something different and considerably harder to categorize. He didn't try to categorize it. He had enough to manage.
The legal file that Victoria's team pulled contained, among its 47 pages of corporate background, a single document that changed everything. It was a due diligence summary prepared during the 2017 acquisition process. A third-party audit of the target company's assets and liabilities conducted by the acquiring party's legal team. Standard practice. The summary listed, in an appendix on page 31, a notation about an experimental vehicle program that had been identified during the audit, but whose physical assets were reported as disposed of prior to closing.
The notation was four lines long, but those four lines confirmed, in the language of corporate legal documentation, that Stratton Group had known about program 7-X Meridian before they acquired the company. Had been told it was terminated and destroyed. Had accepted that representation without independent verification. And had, on the final page of the acquisition agreement, included a blanket clause assuming liability for any undisclosed intellectual property developed during the target company's operational period. "They're on the hook," Cole said.