The Gray Man (Gray Man, #1)

by Mark Greaney

“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.”