The Spy Devils by Joe Goldberg (top rated books of all time .TXT) 📕

shoot a round of golf under eighty. He would never taste McDonald’s fries again. His ex-wives would be despondent, he hoped, and he felt slightly amused by that. Just a few feet above the sidewalk, he felt nothing but guilt as his last mortal thought was any chance to fulfill his fantasy to fuck Scarlett Johansson was officially over.

The sidewalk outside the InterContinental Kyiv was crowded with couples returning from a traditional late evening Ukrainian dinner and sightseeing through the fifteen-hundred-year-old city center.

One young couple from a village in western Ukraine celebrated their honeymoon with a fine meal at Pantagruel consisting of beef carpaccio, bruschetta, tomato bread soup, and pasta with rabbit. Every delicious morsel was washed down with too many bottles of the cheapest Italian wine.

They walked through the wooden door framed by red-and-white striped awnings onto the streets of Kyiv. Crossing the narrow cobblestone street, they strolled by a life-size bronze statue of a cat perched on a rock.

“Nice kitty,” they giggled as they patted its cold head worn shiny by thousands of hands.

Their route brought them to the expanse of St. Michael’s Square, dominated on the opposite side by the Ukrainian Baroque style of St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery. They didn’t spend too much time marveling at the pale-blue walls and half-dozen golden domes glimmering in the night. Instead, they bent left around the street toward the InterContinental with nothing but a long night of lovemaking on their minds.

The body hit the concrete head first at forty miles per hour a few feet in front of the young couple. Blood and human debris exploded in every direction as if someone had dropped a spoon into the middle of a warm bowl of meaty red Ukrainian borscht soup.

The blood-soaked couple stood staring at the broken pieces of a human steaming in the night air. Screams and shrieks came from all directions, each sound amplified as they echoed off the hotel and surrounding buildings. The man pulled his companion away from the spreading pool as she fainted to the ground.

She would spend the rest of their romantic honeymoon sedated in her room.

Ten stories above, two men dressed in black business suits, white shirts, and pencil-thin ties had been busy. They located the hotel safe in the master suite bedroom mounted in the walk-in closet. It was larger than most average hotel safes, an oversized accommodation for the important guests who would pay for the suite—the kind of guests who felt they must secure laptops, passports, jewelry, documents, or other valuable possessions.

A digital display above twelve buttons on the beige metal door glowed green in the dimness of the closet. One man pushed the lock button until the display flashed and entered six green zeros—the pre-set, and rarely changed, manufacturer’s administrative access code. The safe door clicked open. Within law enforcement, intelligence agencies, hotel staff, and thieves, it is an open secret that putting anything of value in a hotel safe is as risky as sticking a loaded gun in your mouth, pulling the trigger, and hoping it misfires.

One man swung the heavy metal door open. Inside was an oddly shaped silver briefcase. On a shelf in the safe was a smaller device, similar to a remote control for a television. The man took a dark fabric Faraday electronic signal-blocking bag from a backpack.

He stuffed the case inside and zipped up the bag, making the case electronically invisible. He handed it to his partner, then reached back, picked up the smaller object, and stuck it in his coat pocket.

They left the suite, making certain to close the door. Their total time inside the room was fifty seconds.

They exited the hotel the same way they entered, through the unguarded employee entrance on the backside of the building. Within minutes, a sleek BMW 4 Series Coupe maneuvered through the narrow streets of the Kyiv night, taking a zigzagging surveillance detection route south toward the E40 bridge across the Dnieper River. The men were following orders to locate and remain hidden in a safe house in the Darnytsia District near Boryspil Airport until a man arrived to take the case.

Once over the bridge into the Darnytsia District, the BMW took the south exit ramp off the E40 onto Petra Hryhorenka Avenue. As they turned onto the side street that led to their safe house, the windshield shattered as bullets tore through it and into the men. The BMW veered left, impaling at full speed into a car parked along the side of the road. The exploding sounds of ripping metal and shattering glass were followed immediately by the sudden calm and hiss of escaping fluids from the car.

Inside, the BMW’s active safety systems saved the men’s lives, who sat dazed among the deployed airbags. A passenger van pulled up beside the smoldering vehicle. The side door slid open, and four men dressed in dark clothes, their heads covered by balaclavas, jumped out. With Sig Sauer 9mm pistols raised to shoulder height, two men silently took sentry positions at the car’s front and rear. One other crept around to the other side of the van.

The final man walked to the car, raised his weapon, and emptied the entire magazine of ammunition through the passenger window, then through the shattered front windshield. Inside, their bodies shredded and jerked as glass and blood sprayed across the once pristine interior of the luxury car.

He reloaded the Sig Sauer, then secured the weapon in a shoulder holster. He unlocked the door, pushed back the now bullet-riddled airbags, and with gloved hands, reached in and forced the large dark bag out from between the dead man’s legs. A white phosphorus grenade was tossed in the BMW as the van pulled away into the darkness of the streets of Kyiv. The grenade exploded with a bright flash—the car filled with flames.

In the passenger seat, the man dialed a mobile phone, waited, listened, and then replied “None” to a question at the other end. He powered off the