“Daniel thinks he has a backup plan,” I said. “Get the car. We are going straight to the Boston office.”

We spent the three-hour drive in silence, the windshield wipers sweeping away the steady drizzle.

I sat in the back seat with my laptop open, comparing the digital files Elias had signed with the archives my father had kept in our old attic.

My father’s original drawings were yellowed paper, scanned into high-resolution PDFs.

The schematics Elias had returned to me had a tiny digital watermark in the lower-right corner.

It was a small, stylized letter ‘K’ inside a circle.

But beneath it, almost invisible unless zoomed to five hundred percent, was a secondary registration number.

I copied the registration number and pasted it into the public trademark database.

It belonged to a shell company called Blue Harbor Holdings.

I called my lead corporate attorney, Marcus Vance, while we crossed the state line into Massachusetts.

“Marcus,” I said when he answered. “Search Blue Harbor Holdings in the Delaware registry.”

“Give me two minutes,” Marcus said.

The sound of his keyboard tapping clicked through the car’s Bluetooth speakers.