by Tal Bauer
HUSH
Tal Bauer
A Tal Bauer Publication
www.talbauerwrites.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Tal Bauer.
Copyright © 2017 Tal Bauer
Cover Art by Rocking Book Covers © Copyright 2017
Edited by Rita Roberts
Published in 2017 by Tal Bauer in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Hush
Author’s Notes
About the Author
Connect with Tal Bauer
Other books by this author
Dedication
To my husband, the love of my life.
To Rita. You hung with me through every page, period, and comma. Thank you for all that you do, within the pages and without.
As always, to my readers. You make this all worthwhile.
I am for truth,
no matter who tells it.
I am for justice,
no matter who it’s for or against.
~ Malcolm X
Prologue
Assassinations were, when it came right down to it, easy.
No matter how tight the security, how rehearsed the preparations, life always came with weaknesses. American Secret Service agents stood beside their president on a handshake line, but in the crush and swarming mass of bodies, they couldn’t get eyes on every single person. Hordes of people, rushing for a handshake, a look, a smile. Everyone wanting to be acknowledged by the most powerful man on the planet. It was easy to slide into the crowd, to hide between the smiles and the waving hands.
All it took was one concealed weapon, one fast draw.
President Kennedy had been killed, and his brother after that. President Reagan had been shot. Presidents were never invulnerable. The office, the title, was not bullet proof. Neither were the Secret Service agents, the president’s white knights.
Assassinations didn’t have to be carried out with a gun. Assassination weapons came in every size and shape, thirty-one flavors of destruction.
Boston had taught Americans that they weren’t invulnerable to IEDs. They weren’t just a news clip or a sound bite online anymore. Bombs were always an option. Always the preferred choice for making a big statement, and scattering as many bodies as possible.
But a sniper was still the best choice. The quietest choice. Both the least and the most intimate. A great sniper could squeeze their trigger from a mile away, dispatch their target, and disappear before anyone could even dream of finding them. In those last moments, the moments watching a target moving through the reticular scope, the last moments of the target’s life reduced down to a series of circles and dashed lines, a sniper could feel as close as a whisper away.
Watching someone when they thought they were alone. Watching them mumble to themselves. Pick their nose. Let down their guard, their mask to the world, and let all their raw nerves and frustrated hopes sag. As they let their dreams run flat and they stared at the life they had stumbled into. A sniper was privy to all of that, to the flash in a person’s eyes as they stopped pretending that they were truly happy in any way at all.
Death, then, should be a release. He almost envied the people he killed. One minute alive, wishing for a different life, and then—
A bullet to the cerebellum and a mist of red, a puff bursting as they collapsed like their life was escaping into the air. Or a round into a person’s center mass, where it bounced and spun and shredded so many, many organs.
He picked up the bolt, pulled free from his Dragunov sniper rifle, and rubbed the dark steel, cleaning the metal until it shone. A dot of oil, a tiny smear, and he set it aside.
The Dragunov lay in pieces, hardened steel and wooden stock laid out in precise order, perfect pieces to a jigsaw puzzle he could assemble in moments.
Remnants from a line of cocaine lay off to the side, next to a razor blade and a rolled-up 100-Euro note.
He waited for a phone call. For a voice on the other end of the line that gave him his next assignment, his instructions. He was a gun for hire, a man providing a service for the right price. He was a hard man to find, but for the dedicated individuals who managed to track him down, he was willing to entertain their offers.
Like many others in his line of work, he’d done time in the Russian military, worked his way through the ranks, rising from the dog-shit life of a basic enlistee to a marginally better-off non-commissioned officer. At least as an NCO he could pad his wallet a little bit. And when he’d left the service, he’d taken his Dragunov with him.
His time in the military had beaten out any sliver of nationalistic pride he’d ever had. Russia—the whole fucking country—could go to hell.
So when the call came in with this assignment. Well, he’d been intrigued.
Call him… patriotic.
His phone rang.
“Da?”
The voice spoke, the man who’d hired him, giving him his next instructions.
He was on his way to America.
Chapter 1
May 5th
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Mike Lucciano slammed the side of his fist against the rotten, water-warped door of Stan Coffey’s Fairfax apartment. The cheap wood rattled against the deadbolt, gaping wide at the base. He saw stained carpet, vomit-brown and frayed, mottled with cigarette burns. Dogs barked in nearby apartments, deep growls mixing with the loud drone and tinny laughter of daytime TV. Owners shouted, hollering at the dogs to quit their yapping or they’d smack ‘em.
Mike gave Deputy U.S. Marshal Jim Gordon a long stare. Gordon nodded and went back to watching the apartments, welding himself into the corner of the middle landing, bracing his back against the rusted metal staircase. Flecks of paint fluttered loose and fell to the broken asphalt below. Gordon was one of the two deputy marshals Mike had brought with him for this little chitchat with Stan Coffey. Gordon was young, still in his training year at headquarters in Arlington. He monitored the run-down apartments and surrounding tenement buildings like he was still in the academy, his eyeballs painting a perfect circuit around the clock face, darting from hour to hour like a bobble-head doll. Jeff Silver, the other deputy marshal, watched over both Mike and Gordon, waiting to back up either, or both, if needed.
He shouldn’t have to. This was just going to be a simple chit-chat, an easy call out to remind Stan Coffey that threats against the federal judiciary were taken seriously. He’d rattle his chains a bit, throw his weight and his badge around. Mike would give Stan the opportunity to apologize, recant, and make his mea culpas. They’d all be back at the office in an hour.
Inside the apartment, Mike heard shouting, the loud hacking cough of a lifetime smoker, and then an ambling shuffle heading for the door. Behind the thin wood, he heard a man grumble under his breath, cough, and curse the still-barking dogs. The steady, rumbling barking had alerted the neighbors, and curtains were being pulled back.
Mike could feel eyeballs peering down on them all.
A chain rattled and the deadbolt slid. The door cracked open. Stan Coffey—thirty-nine-years-old, rail thin, with the body of a meth addict and a face to match—leaned against the doorjamb. A cigarette hung from his wrinkled-paper lips. His face looked like his missus had hit him one too many times with a frying pan, and he’d never healed right. His greasy hair stuck up at odd angles, next to the bald patch spreading out from the center of his crown. “What you want?” Stan�
�s eyes narrowed as they swept over Mike.
Mike shoved his star-shaped badge into Stan’s face. “U.S. Marshals, Mr. Stan Coffey. We’re here to talk to you about—”
Stan took off, tearing back into his apartment.
“Shit.” Mike drew his weapon and followed, shouldering open the door and clearing the hallway corners quickly.
Shouting, from the backroom in the dark apartment. Women shrieking. Glass breaking.
He jumped out to the landing and found Silver and Gordon ready to move. “Backside. He’s making a run for the alley.”
Gordon took off. A rickety fire escape, more rust than metal, clung to the moldy walls of the tenement in the stinking alley. When they’d driven in, they’d eyed the metal ladders with wary eyes. Anyone thinking of making a run using that would have to be desperate. It looked like it was just shrugging up to the building and the slightest bit of weight would make the old bolts shear off from the brick siding and send the entire rusted structure to the ground in a puff of orange dust.
Silver radioed for the Fairfax police escorts waiting around the building to move in. They were there as a courtesy, “in case shit”, in the wisdom of the marshals. Well, “shit” had happened.
Mike ran back into the apartment, down the hallway, and burst into the living room. Three women were sitting on a sagging sofa, each wearing a tube top four sizes too small. Mismatched sheets were tacked over the windows, darkening the room like a cave. Daytime soap operas blared from the TV perched on an empty milk crate. In front of the women, stained crack pipes littered a broken coffee table, next to scraps of aluminum foil. Sticky burns covered the bottom of the crack pipes, and the stench of singed hair and melted plastic clung to the dank apartment.
The women screamed, each leaping back on the couch and trying to climb each other, trying to get away from Mike.
“Hands up!” he shouted. “Hands up! Up!” If one of their hands went under a couch cushion, or behind a pillow covered in burn marks, they could come out with a gun. He pointed his pistol at the women and shouted again, “Hands up!”
Cowering, they all raised their hands and turned their faces away, hiding against each other.
“Where did he go? Where is Stan?”
One of the women pointed to the back hallway, her finger shaking.
A narrow door was ajar, and a beam of sunlight pierced the dank living room. Chipped blue tile caught his eye. Stan had escaped into the bathroom.
He heard grunting, and then cursing. Glass breaking. Crashing, things falling to the floor, smashing against tile.
Mike ran for the bathroom, shouldering open the door and throwing his back against the wall. A filthy tub with a ratty shower curtain hanging by only a few hooks sat on the right, and on the left, Stan Coffey hung halfway out of the thin window above the toilet. The window was only a foot tall. Mike wouldn’t be able to get his shoulders through the damn thing, but Stan was doing his best to wriggle his meth-wracked body through the pitiful opening.
“Get the fuck down from there, Stan!”
“Fuck you!” Stan kept wriggling, his scrawny ass shimmying against the windowsill. There was no way his hips were getting through that window, no matter how skinny he was.
Sirens wailed outside. Tires screeched. Mike heard shouts from the street below and feet running into the alleyway. Fairfax police yelled up at Stan. Stan cursed back, a string of nonsense and spit as his legs kicked and thrashed. His foot knocked a toothbrush off the side of the sink. It flew across the bathroom and into the tub.
“Get the fuck down, or I’m going to haul your ass out of there.”
“Don’t you fucking touch me!”
He could grab his feet, but he’d have touch Stan’s nasty sweats, stained with God-knew-what. He could grab him and yank, twist him and slam him into the ground. Stan would get the wind knocked out of him, and that would help with getting him cuffed. “Stan, last warning. Get the fuck down from the window!”
“You touch me, I’ll fucking kill you!”
Bingo. Threatening a federal officer. Add that to his first threat. Stan was looking at a real bad day when this was all over. And probably some serious bruises, too.
Mike heard Silver and a police officer in the living room, ordering the women to stay seated. They were all whimpering, lost in some meth high and probably riding the shiny lights emanating from the TV screen or staring at the glint of Silver’s badge. “Silver! Help me pull this jackass down!”
Silver stomped into the bathroom and chuckled at Stan’s flailing legs and his grunting curses. He took up position next to Mike, but made no move to help. “I’ll cover you.”
“Thanks.” Mike slammed his pistol back in his holster. Silver smirked. Mike started for Stan, edging his way around the bathroom and avoiding Stan’s wild kicks. He’d have to grab Stan as close to the hips as possible, get his rail-thin thighs together, and then fling him down. It’d be like wrestling a cat.
Awesome.
Mike waited for the right moment, in-between Stan’s kicks and right when he started up another screeching curse at the police below. Lunging, he wrapped his arms around Stan’s waist and yanked, pulling Stan’s legs down as he ripped him free from the window. Flopping forward, Stan’s forehead clipped the window’s metal rail, and he roared, cursing Mike as he started to fight.
Spinning, Mike hefted Stan over his shoulder and slammed him face first onto the tile floor. Stan’s breath whooshed out of him, like a bag full of air slapped too hard and bursting. He went limp, his arms and legs starfishing out, and his mouth gaped, a fish out of water.
Mike kneeled on his back, digging his knee into Stan’s kidney as he cuffed him. “Stan Coffey, you are under arrest.”
Stan’s breath was starting to come back to him. “Fuck you, you motherfucker.” He spat, but only managed to spray his own cheek.
“Yeah, right back at you.” He grabbed Stan’s handcuffs and hauled him up. “Get up. You’ve just turned this into a very long day.”
Stan sat in the back seat of one of the Fairfax police cruisers, glaring at the headrest. Once, he’d started kicking at the door with his bare feet until the officer hollered at him and threatened to taze him if he didn’t quit that shit.
Police crawled over Stan’s apartment. The three women, his three girlfriends, were huddling on the curb in handcuffs, still high on their meth hit. So far, they’d found enough meth to put Stan away for a very long time, a handful of unregistered handguns in the kitchen cupboards, and, of all places, the fridge.
Neighbors stared down at the scene, hanging out of open windows and glaring, crossing their arms as they watched the police and the marshals like their beady eyes were weapons, lasers that would banish them from the block.
Silver leaned against the hood of his SUV, crossing his arms as Mike read off the list of what the police found. He whistled. “Not his day, is it?”
“Nope. Serves him right. What the hell did he think was going to happen, shooting his mouth off online about wanting to kill Judge Brewer and then running when we came knocking?”
Judge Tom Brewer, the newest judge to the Washington DC Federal District Court, had just handed down a stiff sentence to the owner of a web hosting server on the dark web, and a ringleader of the dark web community. Clownface, his online moniker, was responsible for curating the massive online black-market trading boards and facilitating transactions of everything from child pornography to illegal weapons to drugs. The trial had been awful, filled with gut-churning testimony about the truly horrific and obscene happenings deep in the twisted bowels of the dark web.
When Clownface was sentenced to life in prison—the maximum sentence Judge Brewer could impose, though few thought that a baby federal judge would go to such lengths—online outcry reached a fever pitch. The usual gamut of crazies, trolls, and civil rights extremists stormed the internet, but they were joined by hordes from the Sovereign Rights movement. White supremacists, tax protestors, secessionists, and others who rejecte
d the federal government and screamed about the overreach and abuse of federal authority.
Mike had had enough of dealing with Sovereign Rights groups for five lifetimes.
A large portion of the Sovereign Rights groups’ infrastructure and funding had come from the dark web, with significant transactions running through the very site Clownface had managed.
And Stan Coffey, Sovereign Rights nobody, wannabe white supremacist, professional methhead and troublemaker extraordinaire, had run his mouth off on an internet forum, saying that Judge Brewer should be dragged out of the courthouse and shot on the steps. In the ensuing back-and-forth with his fellow nutjobs, they all decided a wood chipper would be a better means of dispatching Judge Brewer, again, on the steps of the courthouse.
A subpoena later, the marshals had the IP addresses and emails of the users making the postings, their physical addresses, phone numbers, and all billing information for those accounts and any other connected social media accounts, cell phones, and laptops.
Whether the online postings were a “true threat”, pursuant to Chapter 18 of the U.S. Code, was up to an investigation and the United States Attorney. Mike, deputy marshal and deputy judicial security inspector assigned to the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse, the DC federal courthouse, and to Judge Brewer’s court security, only planned on banging on Stan’s door to talk him down from his threats. Most of the time, that’s how the bluster ended up shaking out. An apology and urgent insistence that someone was just blowing their mouth off, followed by a quick search of their apartment to confirm they didn’t have any weapons.
Mike would have been out of there in half an hour.
Now, one of the Assistant United States Attorneys, AUSA Cassandra Solórzano, would have to bring charges. Stan had threatened a federal judge, and he had the means to carry it out—a stack of unregistered firearms. He’d threatened Mike, a marshal. It was five years for each threat against a federal official, so Stan was starting at ten years minimum. And that was before the drugs and the guns.