He had known because he was the one who took the original drawing off Mason's desk and submitted it to the board with the attribution removed. He had known because he had watched the simplified version propagate through the company systems for a decade and had never corrected it.
And he had known the moment Mason walked into the facility three months ago with a false surname on a thin resume exactly who he was looking at. Cameron had not flagged Mason's hiring to protect the company.
He had approved it to keep Mason close and visible and controllable. A maintenance worker with no title and no standing could be removed at any convenient moment.
And he had engineered exactly that removal using a liability argument that was technically valid and morally empty before Mason's presence became something harder to manage. What Cameron had not calculated was that Evelyn Vance would go looking for something that no one had looked for in 10 years.
She called him to her office the following afternoon. She did not schedule it through his assistant.
She sent the message herself directly to his phone, and when he arrived, she was standing at the window with her back to him and three items arranged on her desk. He looked at them.
He did not sit down. The first was the original handwritten GT7 drawing set with the notation in the lower margin and the initials in the corner.
The second was a chain of internal emails from 10 years prior authored by Cameron, submitted to the board attributing the GT design to the engineering department in aggregate. The third was a paper napkin, yellowed, creased, handled carefully, with a pressure distribution sketch in pencil and the same two-letter mark.
Dominic had kept it in his wallet for 10 years in the uncelebrated and total way that certain men hold onto proof of things that should not be forgotten. "The licensing deal with the German group," Evelyn said, still at the window, "it's terminated."
"The GT design intellectual property cannot be licensed by Vortex because the original authorship was never formally assigned. The actual author never signed a transfer agreement because no one ever presented him with one, because no one ever acknowledged that the document existed." She turned around.
"You have 48 hours to work with legal counsel." Cameron's voice, when it came, was even. "He abandoned the work."
"He walked out. This company developed and refined and manufactured."
"He walked out because his wife died and he was 21 years old and alone with a newborn." Her voice did not rise.
It settled the way her father's voice used to settle when he had finished deciding something. "And he came back here without asking for anything and fixed the car that was going to kill our driver if nobody caught the fault."