Page 1 of Hush

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 withthisassignment. 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 hismea 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.