THE SPY DEVILS
Joe Goldberg
Contents
NOTE
Foreword
1. The Streets of Kyiv
2. The Streets of Taipei
3. The Hard Way
4. The Devilbots
5. Greetings From the Devil
6. The 12th at Augusta National
7. Find the Devil
8. The Deal With China
9. The Old Timers and The New Kids
10. Serge Taube
11. Asap
12. The Streets of Belgrade
13. Chaos is Good for Business
14. Warning Signals
15. Lomina Street
16. Dream Career
17. Recruitment
18. Adapt to Circumstances
19. Chanel N°5 Parfum Grand Extrait
20. Na Cosku
21. Bondar Battalion-1
22. Nom De Guerre
23. Anna Malinov
24. The Capital Grille
25. The Mole Hole
26. Latin for Guard
27. Kill the Devil
28. Quadrangle Investment Group, LLC
29. The Hint of Coriander
30. Drunk, On Drugs, and Dancing
31. Sharks in the Med
32. 100% Silk Pajamas
33. Plausible Deniability
34. The Bank of Viktor Bondar
35. Taste of Blood
36. Thunderlover
38. Truth is Stranger than Fiction
39. It Sucks to be Pavlo
40. The Day
41. Fade to Black
42. A Proposal
43. Take it to the Bank
44. Beast is Dead
45. What is in the Case?
46. The Stuff Dreams are Made Of
47. A Thin Metal Device
48. Chapel and Chen
49. Where is the case?
50. Research
51. Wrath of the Devil
52. Mr. Nice Guy
53. Who Killed Beast?
54. You are a Liar
55. We Win And They Lose
56. The Stuff of Fiction Books and Movies
57. A Delicious Ruffino Chianti
58. Certificate of Appreciation
59. Angel
60. Don’t Call Me
61. One Month
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By Joe Goldberg
NOTE
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent disclosure of classified information. This does not constitute an official release of CIA information.
The Spy Devils
Copyright 2021 by Joe Goldberg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Electronic Edition: May 2021
13 Digit ISBN: 978-1-7364745-1-8
10 Digit ISBN: 1-7364745-1-0
First Print Edition: May 2021
13 Digit ISBN: 978-1-7364745-0-1
10 Digit ISBN: 1-7364745-0-2
Cover by Damonza.com
Printed in the United States of America
Created with Vellum
To my parents, Gene and Janet.
I wish you were here to read this.
“The Devil hath the power
To assume a pleasing shape.”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
Foreword
FROM BRIDGER
Let me get straight to the point. I never thought I would be writing the foreword to a book, be in a book, or allow a book to be written with me and the Spy Devils as the main characters. Never. Not once.
Then Joe approached me about telling the Spy Devils’ story in a fictionalized book.
I said, “hell no!”
“You have stories that need to be told,” he kept saying.
After many asks, he finally convinced me.
I thought about it. The world is a dangerous place. Why not give people a peek into the world of espionage? Why not shine a little light on topics governments, international organizations, or corporations would rather leave in the shadows?
I did ask for conditions.
Any specific details about our missions had to be changed. Names of all people, companies, dates, and locations had to be changed. We are still active and our enemies would love to find us. There are also regular hard-working people who got caught up in this, and we need to protect them. Some of you reading this will know who you are. Others will think you know, but will be wrong.
I stressed the point that when it comes to the Spy Devils, the old adage ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is, well, true.
Here it is. Truth as fiction.
Bridger
USA
2021
1
The Streets of Kyiv
Kyiv, Ukraine
The instant he was tossed from the balcony of his luxury suite into the cool darkness, he calculated how long it would be before he landed on the crowded sidewalk ten stories below. He couldn’t help it. That’s how his quantitatively-oriented mind worked. Factoring his considerable weight, distance to the sidewalk, and gravity, he determined he would hit the concrete in roughly four seconds. Give or take.
Only a few seconds had passed since he heard the light taps on the wide, overly ornate door of his executive suite in the InterContinental Hotel Kyiv. He was fresh out of the shower and, in his haste, opened the door without looking through the small peephole.
That, he now realized, was a mistake.
A fist with the force of a sledgehammer crushed his nose. Staggering backward, he grabbed his face with both hands. He felt the warm blood already pooling in his palms. Then he felt powerful hands gripping his arms.
Then came the sensation of weightlessness.
Random thoughts wandered into his consciousness. Accelerating past the eighth floor, he admired the beautifully illuminated exterior of the hotel and the city’s gorgeous skyline. His feet were chilly, and he wished his comfy slippers hadn’t flown off like balloons in the wind.
A wonderfully plush hotel-supplied bathrobe fluttered at his sides like broken wings, exposing his enormous hairy naked body. He worried his office would be saddled with the expense of a white robe soon to be ruined with his blood and goo.
Tumbling by the fourth floor and through eyes watering from the wind, the cracks in the sidewalk appeared, flooded by soft yellow rays from lamps near the hotel entrance. The air smelled of river water and exhaust fumes.
Then terror-induced depression arrived from deep within his shocked brain. He would never 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 phone, then removed the battery and SIM card. He tossed the phone out the window, then, after several blocks, he tossed the battery. He stuck the SIM back in his pocket.
They exchanged a nod and smile. The mission was a success. No problems. No witnesses. They had the case. The boss would be pleased. But they were wrong. They had failed to recover the small device from the pocket of the dead man they left in the burning car.
2
The Streets of Taipei
Taipei, Taiwan
“They’re chatting and looking around. Checking for surveillance,” Bridger announced in a calm voice.
He had been on operations like this so many times over the last half-decade his pulse never wavered. It was the waiting that distracted him, and the fact he allowed it to distract him, even briefly, distracted him even more. Patience is a virtue, says the proverbial phrase. Bridger tried to live by it—but he was willing to adapt to circumstances.
Bridger was ready. His team was ready. The mission was in motion and ready to drop like a sledgehammer on the assassins. He looked at his Shinola watch, which displayed, “it’s time to fuck with these guys.”
The sky was bright blue. The air was refreshing. The 7-Eleven smelled like mint air freshener and steaming hot noodles.
The ambush was set.
Bridger sat at a short counter by the windows of a 7-Eleven that provided a direct vantage point to observe the corner of Guangfu Road and Wenchang Street in central Taipei. Bridger was amazed at the quantity of 7-Elevens that dotted the Taipei metro landscape. Every block seemed to have at least one of the popular convenience stores. They were busy all the time, with lots of people standing around eating, reading papers, or just staring into space. This made them perfect locations for static surveillance.
Outside, his covert team, now known worldwide as the Spy Devils, surveilled and waited. His people controlled this area, and only they knew it. Soon, two more members from China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), Bureau X, code named Dragon Fire, would be well aware of the situation.
“Guud mawnin. I teenk we need ah cawplah yuuuuuge egg rolls, right?” Snake said in a bad accent mixed with a thick layer of his linguistically strange New York dialect. He was on a scooter, circling randomly through the nearby streets and neighborhoods. No pattern. No street traversed twice.
A few chuckles squawked in his ear.
“Snake. Concentrate,” Bridger said in a serious voice. “No mistakes.”
“Ruyz-ah-Roynah,” was Snake’s reply. More chuck
les.
“Beast? Demon?” Bridger queried his men hiding in the garage around the corner from Bridger’s position.
“We’ve got the van covered,” Beast’s baritone voice reported.
“We were here all night, dumbass,” a rock-crusher voice crackled over the secure radio. It sounded older, more traveled than the others. “We ain’t sipping a latte. We’re still in this concrete shithole.”
“Remind you of home, Demon?” Snake asked.
“Fuck you.” It was Demon’s standard reply.
That reminded Bridger to issue the warning.
“Demon. Please, don’t kill them.”
“Fuck you.”
“Imp?” Bridger asked.