Agent in Place (Gray Man)

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So Court, against his better judgment but feeling a responsibility to help people against the murderous regime ruining Syria, agrees to try to get in and sneak the baby and his nanny out of the country in Mark Greaney's 2018 Gray Man novel, Agent in Place. There is a reason the Gray Man is a highly sought after contract professional killer. He is a brilliant, top notch operative that is simply a fabulously developed character. Never a dull moment, you will always be guessing about what he will do next. Death a thousand times to the hired Muslim Brothers, Death a thousand times to the Muslim Brothers, the criminal Brothers, the corrupt Brothers.” – Hafez Al – Assad. While completely snowed in Friday afternoon, thanks to ‘Snowmageddon 2018’, I was able to reach New York Times bestselling author Mark Greaney by telephone from my home office here in southwest Michigan. As Greaney touched on in this interview, Gentry is free to take assignments from the CIA or do his own thing. In Agent in Place, he’s on his own after accepting a job from a group of well-connected Syrian expats.

Meanwhile, Sauvage identifies the location of the FSEU safehouse where Medina is being kept, which he relays to Drexler as well as Malik and his men. They infiltrate the estate, making Voland surrender himself to them and killing Tarek in the process. Rima manages to let Medina escape and then sets fire to the house; she was also killed. As Drexler and his henchmen leave the burning building, Sauvage and Malik find Medina running away and then capture her. Try to decompose the different steps, move or turn needed to build a square. player.onChat("square", function () { Robert Littell writes very knowledgeably and convincingly about CIA vs. KGB espionage. Reading a Littell novel is kind of like watching a chess game, with the CIA spymasters on one side of the board and the KGB spymasters on the other side. But the focus of the stories is on the chess pieces: the human beings whose lives are often profoundly affected by the spymasters' machinations.Court goes after the baby, a decision that comes at the price of the mistress’s life. The expat organization 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, Court realizes he’ll have to take down the Syrian president himself if he and the boy are going to make it out alive… Yeah, there was no rush because I liked the idea that there was this hit out on him, and he’s trying to figure out what he did wrong. I wanted to milk that as long as I could,” said Greaney, once again laughing, “and then pay it off to the readers who have spent time reading the books.”

For a while, the studio wanted to use Charlize Theron as Court Gentry, and to change it from male to female, said Greaney. ” So they wrote a whole other script, taking that into consideration. I read it and thought it was really good, but it had nothing to do with my book. I remember thinking, ‘I’d pay to go see this,’ but it wasn’t the same plot at all or even set in the same locations.” Plus,” he added, “the marketing people at the publishing house weighed in and said they liked the fact that Gunmetal Gray, or titles with multiple words on the cover, gives you more print size on each word. They asked me if I could come up with a longer title, which happened right at the point where I was thinking to myself that ‘Weaponized’ sounds like a cool name, but has nothing to do with the book.”

Success!

Characters? Quite a few standouts this time around but for brevity’s sake, I shall focus on four. First, Courtland Gentry. Gentry in this story has an interesting character arc of sorts, one that is self-serving but noble in a strange way. After book 7 where he got rudely reacquainted with the dubious nature of the work he had once done as a government employee, in this story we start with him trying to find a job that will boot his spirits and reaffirm his idealism, a morally righteous mission that will be achieved for his own damn satisfaction, rather than that of his new handler in Langley whom he grew to hate after their first run together. He gets more than he bargained for, finding himself agreeing to an ultimate high-risk proposition which would kill any ordinary soldier or intelligence officer after a week. I always like the names to have something to do with the story, so I started just looking through this big list of names I have for potential books. I have maybe two or three dozen ideas of titles just laying around, and one of them was Agent in Place. Originally, I think Tom Colgan thought of it, and it totally fits this story because ‘agent in place’ refers to an operative who has penetrated into some sort of intelligence target, and that is what the Gray Man does in this one.” agent:agent

In a long interview that covered a wide range of topics, Greaney opened up about everything from writing his first book, to what it was like working with the legendary Tom Clancy, and even what it meant to him when he hit the New York Times list for the first time under his own name. As for Court himself, I liked him. He is a genuine guy with ‘a heart of gold’….a fact which we are reminded a little too much about throughout the novel. He was easy to like and his intentions were honorable but again, I didn’t like being told that on a regular basis.The agent mentioned repeatedly here is none other than Scott Miller, executive vice president of Trident Media Group, one of the most respected and sought-after agents in all of publishing. Miller still represents Greaney to this day, and much like his editor, Mark speaks very highly of him. Travel the world with unlimited resources and loose rules with no one to report to….it all sounds horribly romantic to me, which I am sure in real life it is anything but. However a girl can dream. In all honesty I have not read all "Gray Man Books", but read a few and love this character. I believe the more you read in a series, the more you enjoy the character as you understand his/her personality. Finally, we have Yasmin. Yasmin is the Nanny of the boy Gentry is trying to recover. She may be a secondary character but is a critical component to Gentry’s plan. Despite being a civilian with no combat training, having worked for very violent men, she shows surprising ice-cold nerves and common sense when the strange American barges into her life and makes off with her and her charge in a Hyundai Sonata across Damascus. Avoiding all of the aggravating hysterical woman tropes, Yasmin is a great secondary character, and one who has a surprising and unexpected past, being witness to one of the Levanter’s great betrayals of a dear friend.