Read Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) for Free Online Page B

secure facilities and throwing this stuff up in the cloud,
and no one objected.”
    Grace’s eyes took on a glint of
steel. “And they continue to do it, even though it’s against corporate policy.
I monitor those uploads myself. They just do whatever they want.”
    Sasha addressed Connelly. “That’s
fairly serious. To claim that information is trade secret and entitled to legal
protection, you guys have to take steps to actually protect it.”
    “I know,” he said. “Tate and I
have argued with the head of R & D until our voices are hoarse. Those
scientists are the company’s bread and butter. No one is going to make them do anything .
So, right now, the best we can do is have Grace monitor their activity and hope
none of their accounts get hacked.” He shrugged, helpless and frustrated, then
said to Grace, “Please tell me that’s not what happened?”
    “No, it’s not. There’s a problem
at the Pennsylvania DC.” Grace said.
    “DC, as in distribution center?”
Sasha asked.
    “Right. I guess I didn’t mention
it, did I?” Grace answered. “In addition to research and development centers
and manufacturing facilities, we used to have regional distribution centers—one
on the West Coast, one in the South, one in the upper Midwest, and one in New
Kensington, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, which served the Northeast
and Mid-Atlantic. They were nothing more than warehouses. In recent years, the
company moved to just in time production and closed the DCs.”
    “Just in time production?” Sasha
asked again, scribbling as fast as she could.
    The learning curve for a client’s
new business was always steep. But she’d found it was important to gather as
much information at this stage as she could. Once litigation was underway,
clients tended to assume their lawyers understood their business operations.
Sasha had seen more than one instance of a case going south because an attorney
misunderstood or never fully knew how a client ran its business. It hadn’t yet
happened to her. And she wasn’t about to let Connelly’s company be the first.
    “Right. Instead of housing
inventory, which gets costly, we’ve honed our systems so that we manufacture
just enough of each of our drugs to fill the immediate demand. And as soon as
they’re produced, we send them directly to the customer. It’s more efficient
and less expensive than having pallets of drugs sitting around, potentially
going out of date, while we wait for someone to place an order,” Connelly
explained.
    “Okay, so if you closed all the
distribution centers, how is there a problem at the Pennsylvania DC?” Sasha
said, asking the obvious question.
    “We just reopened it for a
special project. We have a government contract for a minimum of twenty-five
million doses of a vaccine. Obviously, we can’t produce that amount instantly.
And the government, being the government, can’t pay for it all at once either.
So, as doses are manufactured, we’re going to ship them to the Pennsylvania DC
and hold them. Each time we reach a million doses, we’re to invoice the feds,
then they’ll send reservists from Fort Meade in Maryland to come pick up the
vaccines,” Connelly explained.
    “The government’s going to
stockpile vaccines at Fort Meade?” Sasha asked.
    “It’s a national security issue.
We’re not talking about just any vaccine; this one provides immunity to the
killer flu,” Grace explained.
      Sasha had reached the awkward
part of an initial client meeting, where she had to admit she had no idea what
the business people were talking about. Usually, the confession was well
received, and the business people tripped all over themselves to be helpful and
educate her. This time, she had a vague suspicion that Connelly might have told
her all of this during one of their telephone conversations and she simply hadn’t
focused on the details.
    She’d been busy the past several weeks.
In her efforts to adjust to living alone again