The Phoenix Gambit (Tom Harrington #1)

It’s 1999.

The Soviet Union has fallen. The Cold War is over.

But the men who built their careers in the shadows of that conflict are still out there — and they aren’t ready to retire.

Tom Harrington is an American college student backpacking across Europe, chasing cheap trains and summer freedom. When a covert intelligence network known as Phoenix becomes convinced he possesses a stolen microchip containing sensitive Cold War secrets, his trip turns into a manhunt.

Tom has no idea why they’re after him.

He only knows they’re willing to kill for it.

Forced into an uneasy alliance with Harry Fletcher — a veteran British operative running an off-the-books intelligence unit — Tom is pulled into a hidden struggle between former spies, rogue assets, and governments desperate to control information that could destabilize Europe’s fragile new order.

From the Scottish Highlands to Paris, Venice, and the Swiss Alps, the chase escalates into a deadly game of leverage and betrayal.

Because the Cold War may be over.

But its ghosts are still armed.

And the secrets encoded on that microchip could ignite a conflict no one is prepared to fight.

The Phoenix Gambit is a fast-paced international espionage thriller about the dangerous vacuum between empires, the intelligence networks that refuse to die, and the moment an ordinary young man is pulled into a world he will never fully escape.