The discrepancy was small enough to overlook.
That was the point. Men like Meng Wei did not make careless errors — they made calculated ones. The kind that blended into the mass of documentation, unremarkable unless you knew exactly what you were looking for and where to look.
Meng Suyin had found it.
She had described it to me in careful, precise language, the kind of language that strips drama from something dramatic: in the joint development agreement currently awaiting commercial registry approval, the primary landholding entity on the eastern bank of the river access zone had been identified by a registered name that had been in use for eighteen months. But the actual transfer of the eastern bank parcels to that entity — based on the land registry inquiry documentation — had only occurred fourteen months ago.
Four months.
Four months in which that entity had been named as a legally vested party to a binding agreement while possessing no legal standing to be that party.
