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Meridian Trading House did not, on its own letterhead, claim to be anything other than what its name suggested. Ross had spent two weeks assuming that was a lie of omission. It took him a third week to understand it was worse than that — it was simply incomplete, the way a shipping manifest is incomplete if you assume the cargo is the only thing moving.
The patent registry had not been hard to find. It had been sitting, unremarkably, in a box of Swiss commercial filings the occupation government had swept up wholesale and never gotten around to sorting, on the theory that patent law was the least likely category of paperwork to be hiding a war crime. Ross was beginning to suspect that theory was exactly the reason it had worked as well as it had, for as long as it had.
He read the list twice before the shape of it settled — welding, optics, transmission, munitions storage, navigation. Five patents, three code-holders, and every single one of them still active, still being renewed, on schedule, straight through a war in which the countries these three parties presumably called home had spent five years trying to kill each other's citizens by the million.
D-7. A-3. L-1. Ross did not yet have three names to put to three letters. He had one — a Swedish precision-instrument concern, traced through a routine export license that happened to share an address with Meridian's own registered office, three floors up in the same building, which was either an extraordinary coincidence or not a coincidence at all. He was no longer in the habit of assuming coincidence.
...CLIENTS ADVISED THAT ALL POOLED POSITIONS REMAIN INTACT REGARDLESS OF THE OUTCOME IN EUROPE. RENEWAL TERMS TO BE REVIEWED NO LATER THAN EIGHTEEN MONTHS FOLLOWING CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES, REGARDLESS OF WHICH GOVERNMENTS REMAIN PARTY TO THE ORIGINAL AGREEMENT.
Regardless of which governments remain party to the original agreement.
Ross read that line four times, and on the fourth reading understood that it was not carelessly worded. It had been written by someone entirely comfortable with the idea that Germany might not exist in its current form by the time these terms came up for review, and equally comfortable with the idea that this would change nothing material about the agreement itself. Governments were, to whoever had written this memorandum, a category of counterparty. Replaceable, like a supplier who'd gone out of business. The patents did not answer to Berlin or Washington or Stockholm. They answered to a filing cabinet in Zurich, and the filing cabinet had every intention of outliving all three.
He went back to the torn entry at the bottom of Exhibit VIII, the one he had read past twice already because his eye had wanted it to be nothing. Field trial, second unit. Two words, half the sentence they belonged to gone with the tear, sitting under a patent number he hadn't yet matched to anything.
He had been building this file on the assumption that Panzer 101 was the whole of it. A crew. A hull. A single, terrible night on a single river.
He read the two words a third time before he let himself consider what he was actually looking at.
