The Gray Man (Gray Man, #1)

by Mark Greaney

Comprising a large suite on the top floor of the white building are the offices of Cheltenham Security Services, a private firm that contracts executive protection officers, facility guard personnel, and strategic intelligence services for British and other western European corporations working abroad. CSS was conceived, founded, and run on a daily basis by a sixty-eight-year-old Englishman named Sir Donald Fitzroy.

LaurentGroup, a mammoth French conglomerate that ran shipping, trucking, engineering, and port facilities for the oil, gas, and mineral industries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.

The killer was good. He was better than good. He was the best. He was the one they call the Gray Man.”

“You’re bluffing. You know nothing.” Lloyd smiled. “I’ll give you a quick taste of what I know, and then you decide if this is all a bluff. I suspect I know more about your boy than you do. Your killer’s real name is Courtland Gentry, goes by Court. He is thirty-six years old. American, his father ran a SWAT school near Tallahassee, Florida, where Gentry grew up. The boy trained with tactical officers on a daily basis. He was instructing SWAT teams in close quarters battle techniques by the time he was sixteen. When he was eighteen, he fell in with a bad crowd in Miami, worked for a Colombian gang for a while, was arrested in Key West for the shooting death of three Cuban drug dealers up in Fort Lauderdale. “A CIA big shot who had trained at Court’s father’s shoot house snatched the kid out of prison, sent him to work in a secret division within the Operations Directorate. He worked covert ops around the world for a few years, black bag jobs mostly, until 9/11, when he was placed in the Special Activities Division, working in an agency irregular rendition task force. Officially known as Special Detachment Golf Sierra, it became affectionately known, to those few who knew about it at all, as the Goon Squad.”

Gentry had spent sixteen years in covert operations, studied faces and evaluated threats for a living. He knew what an operator looked like when the fight was over, and he knew what an operator looked like when the fight was about to begin.

“Here in Risk Management Operations we like to say that every problem can be dealt with one of two ways. A problem can be tolerated, or a problem can be terminated. If a problem can be tolerated, Mr. Lloyd, my phone does not ring.”

As with any legend, many of the details were enhanced, enriched, or wholly fabricated. One of the details of the myth of the Gray Man that was true, however, was his personal ethic to only accept contracts against targets that he felt had earned the punishment of extrajudicial execution. This was entirely novel in the world of killers for hire, and though it enhanced his reputation, it also caused him to be extremely choosy about his operations. Gentry took the toughest of the tough ops, went into bandit country alone, faced legions of enemies, and built a reputation and a bank account that was unrivaled in his admittedly low-profile industry. In four years he had satisfactorily performed twelve operations against terrorists and terrorist paymasters, white slavery profiteers, drug and illegal weapons runners, and Russian Mafia kingpins. Rumor had it he’d already made more money than he could ever need, so the inference was that he did what he did for the purpose of righting wrongs, protecting the weak, making the world a better place through the muzzle of his gun. The myth was a fantasy, not reality, but unlike most fantasies, the man at the center of this one did exist. His motivations were complex, not the comic-book stimuli that had been ascribed to him, but at his core he did consider himself one of the good guys.

No, he didn’t need the money, nor did he have a death wish. Court Gentry was the Gray Man simply because he believed there existed bad men in this world who truly needed to die.

“You can do one thing for me.” Maurice smiled as he spoke. “When you get yourself extracted from this mess you’re in, I want you to get away to some tropical island somewhere. When you read in the paper about an older-than-dirt disgraced American banker dying in Switzerland, I want you to go out to your favorite cantina, find yourself a pretty girl, and drink the night away with her. I’m serious. Get through this and get out of this life. There are still corners of the world where no one gives a shit what you’ve done. Go there. Meet somebody. Live like a human. Do that for me, kid.”

“Someday you will learn. All the things you’ve done, all the things in the past you thought were dead and buried—you think you’ve put them behind you, but you haven’t. You’ve just stored them away. Stored for the time when there is only you and a quiet room and your memories and the goddamned demons of those you killed.”

“I . . . I am not so experienced with humans,” she said. “You’re doing great.” She fought her timidity and looked Gentry over from head to toe. “What happened to you?” “I got shot in the leg. A couple of days back.” “With a gun?” She looked down at the open three-day-old wound in his thigh, then back up to the bloody hip. She quickly pulled rubber gloves on over her small hands. “Mon Dieu.” “And then my legs and feet got cut with broken glass.” “I see that.” “Then I snapped a rib rolling down a mountain in Switzerland.” “A mountain?” “Yes. Then I fucked up my wrist busting out of some handcuffs.” Justine was silent. Her jaw had dropped open slightly. “And your stomach?” “Knife wound.” “Where?” “Here in Paris. About an hour ago, I guess. And then I fell into the Seine.” She shook her head. “Monsieur, I do not know what you do for a living, and I do not want to know. But whatever it is, I think you should find some other type of job.” Court laughed a little, setting fire to the stab wound. “My skill set is not conducive to honest work.”