Agent in Place
Author: Mark Greaney
Publisher: Berkeley
ISBN: 9780451488909
Year Published: 2018
This is the seventh in the high-powered Gray Man series by Mark Greaney. The book opens with the Islamic State group about to execute Courtland Gentry, also known as the Gray Man and leave his body floating with others shot in the head in a bloody lake. Then the story backs up a week earlier to show how Gentry got into this unholy mess.
As ex-CIA, Gentry now is an assassin for hire. He meets in Paris with Dr Tarek Halaby, head of the Free Syria Exile Union (FSEU), to accept a mission. According to Hlaby, all the brave members of FSEU are dead and he jokes that perhaps Gentry would like to kill the Syrian president for him. A mission into Syria, they both agree, is a fool’s errand or a suicide mission. Which means he'll not go there. Halaby hires him to rescue the model Bianca Medina from an imminent IS attack. This is part of a plan that Halaby hopes will deal a serious blow to the Syrian regime and hasten the end of the cruel civil war. A stunning beauty who’s protected by bodyguards in a Paris hotel, Medina is the lover of Ahmed al-Azzam, the brutal Syrian president and a horrible man in the world today.
Halaby hopes to use Medina to bring down her lover by exposing his misdeeds. But instead, Medina drops a bombshell that she is secretly the mother of four-month-old Jamal, Azzam's only son and also the Syrian president's only male heir. The baby boy is hidden away in a Damascus safe house protected by presidential bodyguards.
Meanwhile, Azzam’s wife, Shakira, aka “the First Lady of Hell,” knows about Bianca and wants her dead. Hence, the IS attack, which she has a hand in the plot. Halaby isn't sure if Shakira knows about Jamal, but he's sure she'll kill the boy if she does.
Bianca wants to return to Syria to be with Jamal, but Gentry, against his own better judgement, agrees to go get him after being approached by Halaby. If there’s one shot to snatch the child from the evil dad, that shot was the Gray Man, a sharpshooter who will gladly kill Azzam if only he can get close enough. So Gentry goes after the baby, a decision that comes at the price of the mistress' life. The expat organisation deems the boy now useless to their cause and refuses to protect him against the Syrian first lady and the notorious Swiss assassin in her employ. With no support on the way, Gentry realises he'll have to take down the Syrian president himself if he and the boy are going to make it out alive.
So, as anyone who follows the series knows, there is plenty of blood spills as the pages are turned. Whether any of that blood is Azzad's is for the reader to find out. Court Gentry claims to kill only for cash, yet he mostly nails just the bad guys and deep down, he has a moral code to follow on who he kills. Readers of the crime thriller will salivate over this fast-moving and well-plotted story, which is part of a consistently appealing series in which each assignment is billed as the most dangerous ever.
Somehow, Greaney manages to keep cranking out one winner after another. That’s a lot of work for the Gray Man and plenty of pleasure for thriller fans.
