Clarity Hunters
by James Schubring
We are delighted to welcome author James Schubring to Omnimystery News.
Earlier this week James provided us with five copies of his new suspense thriller Clarity Hunters (January 2015 ebook format) to give away, and today and we are pleased to introduce you to it with an excerpt, the first two chapters.
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THE VERDICTS WERE NOT GUILTY. Eighteen of them, straight down the list.
The three defendants, and the corporation they worked for, were totally clean. It was like the ruptured pipes had never happened, the water table was cleaner than ever before, and not a single child or old woman visited a doctor to get the big "C" stamped in her records. There were no funerals, no tears. Officially, at least. Not guilty, remember?
Not guilty meant it never happened — and you can't make us change our minds.
The trial judge, an elected sort, had done his damnedest to get a conviction. He'd wanted to hear the word guilty more than the zealous prosecutor looking at his own campaign for higher office. The man in black robes definitely had a dog in the race, which was always the case, don't let anyone mislead you. The world operates based on a lot of convenient fictions; impartiality was pretty high on the list.
The judge's instructions should have been enough to get eight or ten guilty verdicts that were worth millions of dollars in corporate fines plus significant jail time for the three unrepentant souls behind the table.
Even before the grim-hearted judge finished the proceeding, the folks who had taken up most of the third row from the rear, on the right side, behind the defendants, slipped out en masse.
They ran the corporation, had a corporate jet, and flew it back to headquarters. They no longer needed to be in the shithole where the courthouse had been. The corporation was safe. They'd upgrade the pipes, of course, and the chemicals would flow and the wary eyes of any regulators who weren't already rented would eventually nod back off to sleep.
The verdicts were done, but that didn't mean all the work was done. The rest required planning. The leaders of the corporation set up shop in the boardroom about six thirty — after sending home all the administrative staff on the ninth, tenth, and eleventh floors. What people could see was almost as valuable as what people could hear. Everyone not involved in the meeting went home.
They took the usual precaution of shutting down elevator access to the top floors. They did all these steps, and more, when they started or finished a war party, a set of actions that had been more common in the last five years.
Phones were uninvited, laptops verboten, even pens and paper unwelcome. They encouraged dangerous doodling or, worse, note taking. This might be a meeting in the board room with most of the members of the board present in person or over an encrypted teleconference, but it wasn't a board meeting. These hours would never be memorialized on paper. Why? A few truly independent folks who had seats hadn't been invited, better they not know, never ask to see minutes for a meeting that hadn't happened. Tomorrow the private company could go back to pretending it was as well governed as any public company. For tonight, it was extended family only.
At ten after seven, the chairman gaveled open the non-board board meeting. The chairman was the current head of the Booker family, Clarence Booker. He didn't like explaining himself under the best of situations. Of course, that day was not the corporation's best day, even with its vindication in a rural courthouse.
The first topic, as well as most of the others, was money. Spending it, not making it.
If Clarence was considered cheap and mean by the public, especially in those profiles printed about him, then he had done an amazing job collecting even cheaper and meaner folks for his board. Some of them weren't his choice; they just had enough shares behind them to demand a seat. In a third-generation family business, there were all degrees of relations who had some shares to their names. Clarence only controlled twelve percent of the company as the only child of the founder's oldest son. Others who had fared less well with wills and inheritances had to scrape together an alliance to demand a seat.
The first vote for a bonus for the law firm that defended their top employees in Mississippi failed. It wasn't an official vote and no notes would ever be made, but family memories were deep and long and spiteful.
Clarence wasn't going to spend money until he had agreement, even if it required opening the kimono, sharing a few more of the company secrets that these folks would realize they didn't want to know. Necessity didn't make it easier. Clarence Booker didn't appreciate having to explain how he kept the family's business afloat. But he needed the money for the law firm and some others. Clarence had to explain just why the bonus wasn't quite so optional.
There was no disgust when he completed his careful second presentation of the motion. He hadn't said what he really meant, but his careful words and slow pace had folks reading the pauses in between his words. The uptake? The law firm had done good work in front of the judge and even better work behind the scenes putting some friendly bodies on the jury.
The second time, the extended family members voted for the bonus payments, in large amounts. Large amounts for them, but small compared to what the criminal verdicts could have unleashed in civil suits for Booker Holdings, and Booker Chemicals, both self-insured corporations.
Clarence thought he was in a better spot when he began the next questions, how to handle the three employees who had just been acquitted. He proposed generous rewards for their keeping their traps shut, surviving the deadly hail of media coverage, and having the good sense to shred the memos before the indictments came down.
Clarence started the conversation with "how much" and "when."
Wrong. The arguments were venomous. You'd have thought Clarence was proposing that each board member pay in square inches of skin or something, not dollars and topped-off pension plans. Early retirements or performance bonuses, all perfectly legal, all cheap by any mathematical standard.
The yelling slowed then stopped. Folks were tired, dropped off to sleep mid-sentence. Only none of the ones in the room ever woke up again.
Board meeting adjourned sine die.
The story was a seven-day wonder. "Four Billionaires Suffocate Along With Other Booker Chemical Honchos."
That was the Times headline.
The forensic analysis, when it came back, was that corroded pipes had broken in the ninth and tenth floors on their way to a kitchen reserved for the executive dining room on the tenth floor. The gas, particularly dirty and almost unrefined, certainly lacking the safety-stench of mercaptan, filled the empty floors. The boardroom was filled with yelling, people taking in great gulps of toxic air. So the billionaires who debated minor bribes didn't notice that their own negligence was beginning to kill them.
It took some time, but investigators determined that the gas lines had been connected not to the utility's natural gas service, but to an unmonitored connection with local gas reserves. This connection had been made when the building was constructed. It just took twenty-three years of forgetting the maintenance schedule for the design to show itself dangerous.
A penny saved times twenty-three years wasn't quite the healthy investment folks thought.
Black Swan Program / Considerations
1. How could the Booker organization have foreseen and prevented this?
2. How could law enforcement or intelligence services or building safety organizations have foreseen and prevented this?
3. How does the Merit Group create a system to protect vulnerable structures or firms or agencies against such an occurrence in the future?
4. Let's assume not everyone was satisfied with the forensic analysis report. Let's assume some people believe this incident was intentionally set in motion. How does law enforcement track down the perpetrators? They weren't given to bragging, were extraordinarily patient, and left no obvious clues other than an overwhelming poetic touch.
Chapter Two
Hugh put down the printed booklet he'd just read. It reminded him of college admissions testing, all the way down to a little seal he'd had to break to get inside the document.
Others in the room had finished; two were still reading. He wanted to tug on his collar, but resisted. He was here in a dark suit, the kind a lawyer might instruct a client to purchase to look right in a courtroom, an ugly suit, so far out of fashion it might have ridden the pendulum back into currency.
Hugh didn't dress in a suit unless he had a meeting with a bank or a funeral, not much difference. Maybe a wedding if he didn't like the couple, wanted to do his part as a darkened grim reaper looming at the back of the proceedings. He had developed a pathological hatred for uniforms of all types.
The clothes he preferred depended on the day, the schedule. Today Hugh should be wearing a sweatshirt splattered in slurry, supervising the pouring of concrete. If he weren't in this room; if his concrete contractor hadn't flaked on him at four the prior afternoon.
The panel leader looked up, saw who was still working through the pages, and then broke eye contact. Eva, she said her name was.
Hugh looked around the room. Steel and concrete and glass, sleek and expensive. Hugh admired the technical craft, wondered who did their concrete pours. They'd delivered a superior job. Hugh wondered if he could ask for the phone number — had to be better than blundering along with his current pack of unfunny clowns.
Hugh made a mental note. In the next break, he was going to explore what he could of this structure. The folks who'd put it together had done fine work, master's work.
Hugh kept from thinking of the pages in front of him.
He'd rather think of concrete pours right now. He'd rather be watching a concrete pour. He had a problem, maybe a problem. Maybe. Maybe there was something wrong. Maybe he saw the same faces in his favorite coffee shops. Maybe he was having more trouble than he should with permits.
So it was maybe a problem. Too many maybes, too much wondering, too little certainty.
The worst thing in the world was not knowing. Limbo, the medieval theologians had called it, stuck in the middle. We called that maybe now, just as horrible. Hugh was seeing things he didn't like, a series of them, different shapes, expenses, colors, durations. Hugh was at the stage of trying to determine if there was a single cause he was seeing or just one metric ton of shit luck.
Hugh leaned to yes, it was something and not just a terrible string of luck. As to cause, he had about three thousand different options, all of them as remote as a bit of krill was close to the sun.
The Merit Group was on his list. The concrete assholes, too. A couple of former employees. Lots of folks. But Hugh tried to be systematic about things. He wanted to cross off options, not keep expanding the list.
The Merit Group had sent Hugh four invitations to these events, whatever they were, over the last five years, persistent. He'd declined before, but Hugh wondered now if there was a connection between these people and his troubles.
He didn't say no this time. He got in his car and drove. This particular location was pretty close, which might be why Hugh was on their list at all. A few local bumpkins to round off the bookkeeping. Like the bell curve: one end with those who made frequent television appearances; its opposite, those who didn't bother to buy a new television when the old one broke.
Here Hugh was inside a superb building, he'd been served a cooked breakfast in the upstairs ballroom, and everywhere he went he had a minder. The man was armed and walked with Hugh as soon as he'd signed in. An escort. Right.
A noise caught Hugh's interest. The last person sitting at the conference table put down the booklet.
Eva stepped forward, stood a moment, and then sat down at the head of the table.
"Let's get started, then. Good morning, welcome again to the Merit Group. My name is Eva."
She had introduced herself before when she handed out the booklets. Perhaps she knew to say her name a couple of times for people who didn't usually bother with a subordinate's name.
"My colleague is Tara. The invitation to this meeting, maybe you found it opaque, unclear. That's intentional. We only want the curious to actually attend our meetings." A few people, not including Hugh, gave appreciative smiles. "For the past few decades, we borrow brilliant people for a few hours to run through challenging scenarios. Sometimes games. Strategic games."
"War games?" the oldest man in the room asked.
Eva nodded. "At times, yes, war games. Today, the Merit Group is working off a different government contract, not military in nature. The request has stumped us pretty hard. So we need some additional minds, ones drawn from different corners of the world. In this room, and in others throughout the building, we have computer programmers, retired military planners, skilled chemists, former spies, experts in construction and aviation and engineering, disaster managers, and current or retired federal agents from seven armed services. Even a couple of novelists who have uncanny insights into things they probably shouldn't know."
"Not military, the contract?" a woman asked.
"Not a military contract, that's correct."
The woman with her hair dyed red nodded. Not quite satisfied, but willing to listen.
"The first case is the document you just read. I didn't give you any instructions other than to read it."
"Is it classified?" the woman with the dyed hair asked.
"This is not sensitive or classified in any way."
"Thank you."
"I will caution you that your work here for us is performed under contract. What you have to say is for our ears," Eva said. She pointed at the wall of mirrors. People or cameras were back there taking all of this in.
"I understand."
Not classified, but not something for your blog or Twitter followers.
"You've read this story. We'll discuss it. Most of you will have one or two more meetings like this one later on. Approximately one hour each, approximately twenty minutes between sessions if you need to refresh yourself. We will cater a lunch after the second meeting. Other questions?"
Folks had become serious.
No one said anything.
"Take notes if you like during the discussion. We'll shred the booklets as soon as this session is done, before you leave the room."
She pointed to a box in the corner. If it was a shredder, Hugh had never seen anything more industrial strength. Maybe it reduced the paper back to its original fibers?
"One question," Hugh said.
"Yes, sir."
"There was a note about the Black Swan program?"
"Yes."
"Can you explain that?"
"Perhaps someone in the room could volunteer an answer?"
Ah. The Merit Group wasn't paying them so they could hear answers from their employees.
No one wanted to speak first now.
Eva had steely eyes as she looked around the table. There were eight of them, including Eva, excluding Tara, who was still standing near the door. Three women, five men. Ages from the twenties to the seventies, maybe older.
"All right. We may come back to the Black Swan. Why don't we start with the first question. What actually happened and what could Booker have done about it?"
"Check the damned pipes," the oldest man said, retired military.
Hugh was just guessing, but it wasn't a hard guess to make. The man could have stood in for R. Lee Ermey in a film or two.
Slowly, torturously, Eva coaxed the room.
The first question was a bust, bland like a nutritionist's recommended diet. No salt, no fat, as much crunch as iceberg lettuce could provide. Other answers: chemical detectors (also from the old man), a revamped quality control department and public relations program (the middle-aged woman), a security strategy that kept the key board members and shareholders from occupying the same space at the same time, might lose one or two, but not everyone (the man a few years older than Hugh). Bland.
The second question had the old warhorse spouting off and smothering the room with his carbon dioxide. Hugh kept to himself through the third question, although the youngest person in the room, the girl with hair that resembled the cells of an aquamarine beehive, did say a few smart things.
He was interested in that fourth question. Hugh did wonder about that, implying that the accident had been intentional in some way. He wondered how someone could pull off gassing an entire building without leaving a trace. He'd never heard of Booker Chemicals so … this was fiction rather than fictionalized reality. Maybe the novelists Eva had referenced in her introduction weren't participants, but creators of the scenarios.
These four questions didn't even glance at the most interesting parts of the story, not even close. Hugh grappled with how a company could buy a verdict with official impunity. It took some act of god or some very clever vigilantes to bring them low.
The four questions were shit. Of course, a think tank would ask a group of strangers to keep focused. All the particles of smoke must remain with their armed minders, no wandering.
Like a think tank could take on chaos in any real way.
Hugh leaned forward. Everyone just seemed so sure of their suggestions. Eva had never answered his question about the Black Swan. These people hadn't even picked up on it.
There was a brief pause in what passed for a discussion. "How can we plan for the unplannable?" Hugh asked.
He didn't keep all of the irony out of his tone.
"Back to the black swans, then?" Eva asked.
"Yes."
"Could someone explain that?" the warhorse demanded.
"For thousands of years Europeans believed all swans were white. Then European explorers in Australia, I think, found swans there. Black swans. Who could have ever expected to find black swans? No one, except the indigenous people. They might have been surprised at white swans, though."
The retired general, maybe master sergeant, looked baffled, not enlightened. He wasn't much for metaphor, Hugh guessed.
"Breaks the mind, right?" Hugh asked.
"Well, yes," Eva said.
"What does that have to do with anything?" the old man asked. "Swans. Loud, damned birds."
"A lot of people, the government included, are spending money to ready us for things we couldn't normally think of. Things more dangerous than discovering that a bird comes in more than one color."
Eva nodded. "That is the purpose of the grant."
Hugh put his hand on the booklet. "This was an interesting story, but it's impossible to predict in advance that something like this would happen. Particularly for the kind of cartoon villains we have in the story. Poisoning people adjacent to their facilities; they'd never think of someone attempting to poison them with chemicals. Tit for tat."
"Impossible?" the moderator asked.
Hugh nodded. "Yes, it would be impossible to plan for this until after the first time it ever happened in this particular way."
The room was definitely cold to him. He was done talking. He'd sit through the other groups, collect his cash, disappear back to his slurry and his problems. Hugh looked over to the moderator.
The moderator wasn't ready to hand off the question. "So they couldn't have saved themselves?" Eva asked.
"Had they been the second target, yes. If they'd seen this happen to someone else. But as the first target? No. They were dead," Hugh pronounced like a coroner.
"I disagree," the youngest woman, honeybee-hive, said. "I don't think any kind of thought is impossible."
"Oh," Eva said. "Continue."
Both women received approving looks from others in the room. There was the proof for Hugh. The room rewarded the hot air artists, so the room tipped toward hot air.
"There was a warning. This kind of thing has happened accidentally. In India, at Bhopal. Other places going back decades and longer," the young woman said.
"All right," Eva said, encouraging the thought.
"Why couldn't the security people at Booker have prepared for that kind of accident or mistake? The ways you prepare for a mistake also protect you from an intentional exposure, I'd think."
Nods rippled across the room. Folks didn't understand. If someone had tried to get a company to prepare for this situation, well Chicken Little would have wound up with a better reputation.
Hugh shook his head.
"You disagree?" Eva asked.
Hugh thought of denying his own view. The people in this room … they weren't thinkers. This wasn't the kind of conversation you could have where those who brayed loudest "won" the meeting.
"Please explain," Eva pushed.
"Accidents can happen at a factory. Yes, I agree. The wind or the water can take that accidental or negligent exposure and push it around, hurt a lot of people."
The younger girl smiled, vindicated. As if the winner of the conversation would be proclaimed a winner in life.
"In fact, the same idea even occurred in the story we read. Remember what the trial was for. Leakages at the fictional company's factories," Hugh said. "But it never happened at a headquarters-type building. Headquarters are in safe places, right, well away from danger. The work gets done elsewhere. So security folks think of elsewhere as their problem. Not the building with the boardroom in it."
Eva looked around the table, reading the hostility. As if they expected to see an improbable event in the future, get lauded as a superior fortune teller or psychic. "Any other thoughts on the fourth question? Perhaps something to do with tracking the possible perpetrators?"
She had developed the plaintive sound of a teacher who knew the students hadn't done the reading.
That freed the others, all strivers. The room shed its politeness after that, but Hugh was mostly quiet even when some of the others spiked a remark his way. The others sounded like they'd learned conversational etiquette by watching television news twelve hours a day. Screaming, talking over each other, competing for a smile from Eva.
He listened and drew on the blank pages of his booklet. He did write a couple sentences. They don't understand. They don't want to understand. It's easier to tussle.
Hugh hadn't learned much about the topic of discussion, but he knew a lot more about the people in the room. How their minds worked. How they listened or didn't. How they defended ideas that were all theoretical. How they had to win.
The group made it through all four questions before time ended. They seemed, as a group, to consider the time well spent. Not Hugh, not that he said anything.
Before Hugh left the room, he pushed the booklet through the very quiet shredder. He saw the minuscule flakes rain into the clear bottom portion of the machine. Softer than duck down.
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Photo provided courtesy of
James Schubring
James Schubring grew up on Willy Wonka, James Bond battling SPECTRE, and Columbo reruns. Maybe it was inevitable that he leave rural Montana to study literature in the big city, work briefly in the pie-and-sky world of technology, and get bitten by the writing bug.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at JamesSchubring.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Twitter.
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Clarity Hunters
James Schubring
A Suspense Thriller
Hugh Brier went to what he thought was a focus group. He came away with two things: a dossier detailing the obscure events leading to his brief federal incarceration and a job offer from the Merit Group.
He runs from any organization that would want to hire the "old" Hugh Brier, but when his life fills with the dealings of a dangerous enemy can he afford the luxury of saying no?
