The Gray Man (Gray Man, #1)

by Mark Greaney

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.

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.”

Court Gentry was the Gray Man simply because he believed there existed bad men in this world who truly needed to die.

“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.”