Somewhere along the way, in the six years since Research in Motion Ltd. introduced the BlackBerry, the e-mail message device became the company's destiny. Then a federal court injunction in a patent infringement suit threw RIM's future in disarray and threatened to knock the BlackBerry out of the U.S. market. Worse, RIM's tormenter was not IBM Corp., Motorola Inc. or some other tech behemoth, but NTP Inc., an obscure patent-holding company in northern Virginia.