Chapter 11: The Evidence

Mrs. Farquhar had built her case carefully. Crane found this out from Van Cleef over two days, extracting the full account of what she had discovered and how. She had been an automata designer with an engineer's mind for documentation: she had assembled her evidence in parallel threads that could survive the destruction of any single component. Thread one: the valuation report, which she had obtained through a fellow member who sat on the Society's finance committee. She had annotated the report with a comparison analysis showing the actual market value of comparable technical libraries. Thread two: the consortium's structure, which she had traced through commercial registries in three countries. The consortium's controlling interest was held by a company that, through two intermediaries, was owned by Harwick. Thread three: the meeting minutes from the five sessions in which the commercialization proposal had been advanced. She had her own notes, and she had persuaded three other members — including Van Cleef — to provide their accounts. She had sent copies of all three threads to Van Cleef in Rotterdam. She had kept originals in her home, in a location she had described to Van Cleef only as 'obvious to the right person and invisible to the wrong one.' 'The chess player,' Crane said. Van Cleef looked at him. 'She told me she had built a record-keeping device,' Van Cleef said. 'That it would be passed on to someone suitable if she were unable to continue. I didn't know it was the chess player.' 'She encoded the location of the originals in the chess player's instruction set,' Crane said. 'The device contacted me by defeating me in a manner that spelled out an address.' Van Cleef sat back. 'She was extraordinary,' he said again. It seemed the only word adequate to her.