When said carefully. Which makes it technically fraud against Blackwood as well as against Daniel personally. Has it been granted? Daniel asked. His voice was level, completely precisely level.
The level of a man who is holding something very large very carefully because he knows that the moment he stops being careful, it becomes unmanageable. When checked the status field pending, it's still an examination. Who at the company signed off on it? Daniel asked. Because patent applications filed by employees on company-owned IP required corporate signoff.
That was standard. That was the process. When scrolled to the authorization section of the document, the signature was Gerald Marsh, former CFO, signed 14 days before his retirement. The room was very quiet, Patterson said very slowly. He got Marsh to sign off on a fraudulent patent application 2 weeks before Marsh retired so that when anyone looked at it later, Marsh would already be gone.
Daniel looked at the application one more time. He looked at his own technology described in language that was almost not quite but almost close enough to his original documentation to have been copied from it. Described and attributed to a different name filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office under Richard Cole inventor. He straightened up. He said, "Dr.
Wen, can you print that?" Already printing. Thank you. He picked up the printed pages from the tray. He held them the same way he'd held the technical manual this morning with the care that a person extends to a document that is about to change something. He walked to the elevator.
I went up two floors. He walked to Victoria's office and knocked on the open door. She looked up. She saw his face. She said, "What now?" He walked in and set the patent application on her desk.
She read it. Her face went through three distinct changes. Recognition, understanding, and then something harder and more final than either of those. She set the pages down. He filed a patent, she said.
Yes. Under his own name. Yes. On your work. On my work.