Double Cross (A Tyler Wolf Espionage Thriller—Book 2)

By Jack Mars

“Thriller writing at its best.”
--Midwest Book Review (Any Means Necessary)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the #1 bestselling and USA Today bestselling author Jack Mars (with over 10,000 five-star reviews) comes a groundbreaking new espionage series: in the ruins of post-war Berlin, as the Cold War grips the globe and the CIA is just formed, a fledgling CIA agent is paired with a beautiful, mysterious KGB defector, and together they must race to avert nuclear war.

As the Cold War grips the globe, rookie CIA Agent Tyler Wolf and KGB defector Anya Fedorov are all that stand in the way of a rogue operative bent on stealing US nuclear plans. Can they stop him before it’s too late?

DOUBLE CROSS is the second book in a new series by #1 bestselling and critically acclaimed author Jack Mars, whose books have received over 10,000 five-star reviews and ratings. The series begins with DOUBLE AGENT (book #1).

The Tyler Wolf series is an exciting and unpredictable espionage thriller that will keep you hooked from start to finish. With a rich history and two captivating heroes, this action-packed series will have you turning pages late into the night. Fans of Vince Flynn, Lee Child, and Tom Clancy are sure to fall in love.

Future books in the series are also available!

“Thriller enthusiasts who relish the precise execution of an international thriller, but who seek the psychological depth and believability of a protagonist who simultaneously fields professional and personal life challenges, will find this a gripping story that's hard to put down.”
--Midwest Book Review, Diane Donovan (regarding Any Means Necessary)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“One of the best thrillers I have read this year. The plot is intelligent and will keep you hooked from the beginning. The author did a superb job creating a set of characters who are fully developed and very much enjoyable. I can hardly wait for the sequel.”
--Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos (re Any Means Necessary)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Mars
• Release date: Jun 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094384399

Book preview

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D O U B L E

C R O S S

(A TYLER WOLF ESPIONAGE THRILLER—BOOK 2)

J A C K   M A R S

Jack Mars

Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising six books; of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising twelve books; of the TROY STARK thriller series, comprising seven books; of the SPY GAME thriller series, comprising ten books; of the JAKE MERCER thriller series, comprising seven books (and counting); and of the new TYLER WOLF thriller series, comprising five books (and counting).

Jack loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.Jackmarsauthor.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!

Copyright © 2024 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BOOKS BY JACK MARS

TYLER WOLF THRILLER SERIES

DOUBLE AGENT (Book #1)

DOUBLE CROSS (Book #2)

DOUBLE ASSET (Book #3)

DOUBLE DOCTRINE (Book #4)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY (Book #5)

JAKE MERCER THRILLER SERIES

ABSOLUTE THREAT (Book #1)

ABSOLUTE DAMAGE (Book #2)

ABSOLUTE FORCE (Book #3)

ABSOLUTE PERIL (Book #4)

ABSOLUTE TREASON (Book #5)

ABSOLUTE VENGEANCE (Book #6)

ABSOLUTE TARGET (Book #7)

THE SPY GAME

TARGET ONE (Book #1)

TARGET TWO (Book #2)

TARGET THREE (Book #3)

TARGET FOUR (Book #4)

TARGET FIVE (Book #5)

TARGET SIX (Book #6)

TARGET SEVEN (Book #7)

TARGET EIGHT (Book #8)

TARGET NINE (Book #9)

TARGET TEN (Book #10)

TROY STARK THRILLER SERIES

ROGUE FORCE (Book #1)

ROGUE COMMAND (Book #2)

ROGUE TARGET (Book #3)

ROGUE MISSION (Book #4)

ROGUE SHOT (Book #5)

ROGUE STRIKE (Book #6)

ROGUE ORDER (Book #7)

LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES

ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)

OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)

SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)

OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)

PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)

OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)

HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)

FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES

PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)

PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)

PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)

PRIMARY GLORY (Book #4)

PRIMARY VALOR (Book #5)

PRIMARY DUTY (Book #6)

AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES

AGENT ZERO (Book #1)

TARGET ZERO (Book #2)

HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)

TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)

FILE ZERO (Book #5)

RECALL ZERO (Book #6)

ASSASSIN ZERO (Book #7)

DECOY ZERO (Book #8)

CHASING ZERO (Book #9)

VENGEANCE ZERO (Book #10)

ZERO ZERO (Book #11)

ABSOLUTE ZERO (Book #12)

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

October 9, 1948

Paris, France

The agent had to stifle a chuckle. The Americans were such children sometimes.

The agent wasn't a fool. It would indeed be foolish to minimize what the Americans accomplished. The agent didn't quite believe the Washington worshippers, who said that without U.S. involvement, the war would have been won by the Germans. There was no doubt, however, that without American aid, the war would have been far longer and far more brutal.

Still, how could they be so strong but at the same moment so weak?

No, weak wasn’t the right word. Naïve. That was better.

The symbol of their naivete at this moment was the safe house the agent observed. The idea of a safehouse was, to begin with, a rather silly one. It would be far better for the fledgling CIA to teach their officers to be safe rather than to buy or rent homes and call them safe.

Did they think that by simply pronouncing a place safe it was free from espionage? That somehow the fact that the Americans owned the property meant that no one would dare violate its sanctity?

The agent thought, rather wryly, that they did.

Foolish.

Well, that was all right. They would learn their lesson. In the long run, they would be better for it.

Or they would be if this was all the agent planned to do. Really, it would be more correct to say the world would be better off for this. It would suffer great pain and much bloodshed, but the agent was confident that when the dust eventually settled, the lesson would be learned, and the world would adopt a much more fair, prudent and effective means of doing business.

And that was all war was, really. Just business.

The agent checked the package, an utterly foolish thing to do if the agent were facing trained and capable operatives. As it was, the CIA officers probably saw the agent as harmless. The agent could have been loading a cannon in front of them, and they probably wouldn’t have sensed danger.

The agent confirmed that the package was in order and pushed off. The bicycle was an old one, rusted and slightly bent, but it worked well enough for this purpose. The agent parked the bicycle in front of the safehouse and whistled jauntily, carrying the package directly to the front door.

Foolish. For God’s sake, could they truly believe that they would receive a random delivery of… of what? Milk? Bread? A large bundle of newspapers?

Well, apparently so, because when the door opened behind the agent, the officer who took the package didn’t even call after the agent. He simply took the strange box into the safehouse, where it would be guaranteed to be effective.

Foolish.

The agent mounted the bicycle and rode off. Perhaps the officers would try to open the package. Perhaps they would even succeed. Perhaps by now, some panicked officer was trying to be a hero and carry the package outside so only his life would be lost and not his fellows.

But it was too late.

The agent didn’t even turn around before pressing the button on the detonator. It wasn’t necessary.

CHAPTER ONE

October 10, 1948

Dublin, Ireland

Anya Fedorov moved through the crowd with a breezy smile on her face. To anyone watching, she was just another woman enjoying a rare but beautiful sunny day in Dublin.

Dublin had been spared most of the horrors of the war, and so, the people here were far happier in general than their comrades in England.

Perhaps comrades was the wrong term. It was Anya’s understanding that the Irish held little love for the British. Anya would have to hope that their hatred wasn’t too great. She believed herself to have a talent for languages, being fluent in several, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and of course, her native Russian.

But Irish accents were impossible. She couldn’t make her lips move right. So, she had to stick to English with an English accent and hope no one would go farther than the dirty looks many cast her way.

The fact that she was here on behalf of her new employers—the American CIA—and not her old, and ostensibly current, employers—the Soviet MGB—only made it more frustrating that she had to masquerade as an Englishwoman and not an Irishwoman. The Irish were ostensibly an ally or at least neutral but aligned with the U.S. She didn’t have the same freedom to break rules that she would with the MGB.

That was just another sign of how much the Americans had to learn. In intelligence work, you couldn’t tiptoe around things. Even when you wanted to be stealthy, you had to be purposeful.

Well, hopefully, she would be on her way back to London by nightfall, or at least in the company of her asset. A lone Englishwoman could count on safety walking through Ireland during the daytime, but at nighttime, the hatred hidden by daylight often felt free to emerge.

Perhaps she was reading too much into this. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as what the Poles had to suffer at the hands of the Soviets. Still, she would rather be done and on her way out of here before her lack of an Irish accent caused her problems.

Her thoughts strayed back to Tyler. As always, the memory brought a slight flush to her cheeks. Anya was not given to romantic fantasies. Aside from growing up in Russia at a time where romance was reserved only for the luckiest and most foolish children, she had trained herself to be an agent of the Soviet Secret Police. Romance was a tool to be used, not a fantasy to be indulged.

Besides, Tyler was young. Anya was forty years old, and while she didn’t feel old exactly, the difference between her wisdom and experience and the twenty-five-year-old Tyler’s… lack thereof… was extremely noticeable. He was attractive physically, but there were so many men who were attractive physically. His naivete was exasperating during their brief sojourn together in Russia and then in Germany, and the thought of a lifetime dealing with that gap in their knowledge was…

A lifetime? Really, what had gotten into her?

She pushed thoughts of him from her mind and focused on the task at hand. The asset was an informant embedded until recently within the government of the Irish Free State. With the Free State likely to sever completely from the British Commonwealth and become the Republic of Ireland within a year, the CIA wanted to know whether they could expect the animosity between Ireland and England to develop again into armed conflict, and if so, whether it would be prudent to intervene on behalf of Great Britain or let them handle things themselves.

This asset had information on the prospective leaders of the Irish Republic, and it was Anya’s job to extract him.

The problem was that she was being followed.

She noticed the two men tracking her about a mile behind. At first, she thought they were simply following an attractive single woman the way many young men did. They certainly wanted her to believe that. Their eyes traveled hungrily to her backside as it swayed underneath the dress she wore, and they grinned with the leers that so many men thought for some reason would attract women.

But as she observed them more, she realized it was all calculated. Their eyes held no lust, no more than the basic lust all men felt for attractive women. They were following someone they suspected of being an enemy intelligence operative, not someone they hoped to have intercourse with.

Anya suspected they thought her a British agent and inwardly cursed the difficulty of the Irish accent. If they thought her British, then they would take her somewhere and interrogate her if they caught her. That meant she would have to ensure they didn’t catch her, and that meant that if they caught up to her, she would have to disable them. If she did that, it would be impossible for her to reach her asset, and she would have to flee the country empty-handed.

Once more, she wished Tyler were here. He wasn’t particularly adept at being inconspicuous, but he could easily be made to play the part of her lover. That was a part he could play very well since he very much wished he was her lover. British tourists were still common in Dublin since the Crown still kept a tight lid on violence against its subjects. No doubt that would disappear once the Republic officially separated from the Commonwealth, but for now, it would have been useful to pretend to be a tourist.

But she didn’t have that option now, so she would have to lose her tail.

She sighed inwardly and prepared for a chase.

An approaching tram gave her an opportunity. She stepped in front of it just before it reached her, then turned and traveled the same direction as the tram—back the opposite of the way she was walking before.

In the crowded streets of Dublin, the tram couldn’t move very fast. It still outpaced her fast walk, but if she could keep her pace brisk enough, she could pass behind her pursuers before they caught her.

The tram finally passed her, and she ducked into a thicker portion of the crowd surrounding a newspaper boy and looked back. The men following her were now ten yards ahead of her. They looked around irritably for their lost quarry.

Anya allowed herself a small smile as she worked her way through the crowd and ducked into an alley. Men were so easy. They thought of everything in the most direct way possible. They didn’t consider nuance or deception at all when they made choices. That was why they were so easily fooled.

There was a time when directness was advisable, of course. She recalled one particularly tense moment in the tunnels underneath Berlin when she and Tyler had been pinned down by a few dozen heavily armed Nazi remnants. She had advocated for a retreat that in hindsight would likely have gotten them killed. In contrast, Tyler had stormed their entrenched position and given them an opening to escape. True, he had nearly gotten himself killed in the process, but he had succeeded.

There she was thinking of Tyler again. She left the alley onto another main road and sighed as she turned right and continued toward the asset’s location. When she left Tyler, she thought it would be easy to forget him. Not forget, of course, but forget her feelings for him. After all, they had only spent a couple of weeks together. They had shared nothing more than a few kisses—good kisses, but what were kisses to a woman her age? She had done far more with targets in order to glean information from them.

That thought brought a frown to her lips. The CIA, she was sure, wouldn’t frown on such tactics if she deemed them necessary, but the MGB practically insisted on them. She couldn’t argue that they weren’t effective, but it was nice to have assignments where it wasn’t assumed she would sleep with strangers.

Besides, she didn’t want to sleep with anyone else. She…

She what? She loved Tyler?Surely, she wasn’t that foolish.

No, she didn’t love him. But she enjoyed his company more