Definitions first. Parties. Subsidiaries. She had learned in Osaka that a contract was a map, and if the map named the wrong place, no amount of good intention would get you there.
On page three she found the acquiring subsidiary, the Ishida division Pierce Global was set to take control of at signing.
On page nine the name appeared again, in the licensing section, attached to the specialized semiconductor patents and the government permissions that made the whole division valuable.
Something snagged. Not the name itself. The number beneath it.
Jasmine went back to page three, then forward to page nine again, slower this time, her finger stopping under each corporate registration number in turn.
They were not the same number.
The digits were close, close enough that a tired eye would bless them and move on. Two of them were transposed in the middle, and one section carried a suffix the other did not have at all.
"Kuroda-san," she said quietly, slipping into Japanese without deciding to, "may I ask something that might sound foolish?"
"Ask," he said, in the same language. "Foolish questions are how careful people begin."
"Why does the same company have two faces in this paper?" she said. "Here it is registered one way. Here it is registered another way. Same name, same address in Osaka, but the numbers tell a different story."
Fujita leaned in. Takagi leaned in. Kuroda took the pages from her hands with a care that told her he already feared she was right.
He laid the two pages side by side on the white cloth, between a wine glass and a plate no one would ever finish, and stared for a long, silent minute.
"What?" he said. "What is it? It is a typo. Every deal has typos. That is why God invented amendments."
"It may not be a typo," Kuroda said at last, in English, so there could be no hiding inside translation. "Miss Cole, explain what you see, please. Slowly, so everyone understands the same thing."
Jasmine took a breath. Her hands were steady only because she pressed them flat against her knees beneath the table.
"The subsidiary named in Mr. Pierce's contract, the entity he is buying control of, carries one registration number," she said. "The license, the actual government license for the technology, is held under the same name but a different registration number."
She looked up, first at Kuroda, then, because honesty required it, at Ishida.
"In Japanese corporate records, that means they are not the same legal entity. They are two separate entities that share a name that sounds identical to an American ear."
"The entity in the contract does not hold the license," she said. "The entity that holds the license is not the entity named as transferring it. So the transfer, as written, may not transfer anything at all. It may be void."
Pierce stared at her as if she had spoken in a language he had paid a million dollars to prove she did not know.
"That cannot be right," he said. "We had three firms on this. Three. They billed me a fortune to make sure it was right."
"No one is saying what your firms did or did not do," Kuroda said. "We are saying what is printed on these pages, tonight, in front of us. The pages do not care who billed for them."
Ishida spoke for the first time since the lawyer's call, his voice low and terribly calm.
"My worry," he said in Japanese, and Jasmine translated before she could think to ask permission, "was exactly this. A structure built years ago, for taxes, for history, that no one untangled before we tried to sell what it holds."
"So one number," he said. "One number, and you are telling me the entire deal, a year of work, is built on the wrong company?"
"I am telling you what I can see," Jasmine said. "The license is the heart of this division. Without it, the factories are buildings and the patents are paper in a drawer in Osaka. If the wrong entity signs it away, a court could say nothing was ever sold."
Kuroda gathered the pages back into order, aligning their edges with a precision that looked like a man holding himself together by neatness.
"We need to check the rest," he said. "All of it. Tonight. If this error lives here, we must know whether it lives anywhere else in these documents."
He looked at Jasmine again, and this time there was no politeness left to soften the request. There was only need.
"Will you stay and read with us?" he asked. "Line by line, until we know what is true?"
Then she thought of the number on page three, and the different number on page nine, sitting there patiently for anyone willing to actually look.
"Yes," she said. "I will stay."
They worked for forty minutes, and afterward Jasmine would remember those minutes as some of the longest and clearest of her life.
The table changed around them. Plates were carried away without comment. Coffee appeared, black and strong, and went cold in its cups because no one wanted to be the person who stopped to drink.
Fujita spread the schedules in a long row, the way a nurse lays out instruments. Takagi opened a laptop and pulled up the corporate registry records Kuroda requested, one slow page at a time.
Jasmine read. That was her whole assignment, and it turned out to be enormous. Read, and say out loud anything that did not match what she had just read somewhere else.
At first she apologized every time she stopped them. By the second stop she did not apologize, because Kuroda waved the apology away without looking up from his notes.
"Do not soften it," he said. "If it is wrong, let it be wrong at full volume. We have had enough quiet mistakes."
The patent schedule was the next to give way beneath their hands.
The core patents, the ones covering the specialized chip architecture that Pierce Global wanted most, were listed as held by the parent company in one exhibit and by the subsidiary in another.