Gunmetal Gray (Gray Man) - Softcover

Greaney, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425282864 ISBN 13: 9780425282861

Publisher: Berkley, 2018

Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Mark Greaney, the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels, delivers another breakneck thriller following the world’s deadliest assassin: the Gray Man . . .

After five years on the run, Court Gentry is back on the inside at the CIA. But when his first mission includes a pair of Chinese agents trying to take him down in Hong Kong, Court wants to know why. 

Court’s high-stakes hunt for answers takes him across Southeast Asia and leads to his old friend, Donald Fitzroy, who is being held hostage by the Chinese. Fitzroy was contracted to find Fan Jiang, a former member of an ultra-secret computer warfare unit responsible for testing China’s own security systems.

The first two kill teams Fitzroy sent to find Fan have disappeared and the Chinese have decided to “supervise” the next operation. What they don’t know is that Gentry’s mission is to find Fan first and get whatever intel he has to the US. 

After that, all he has to do is get out alive...

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Greaney has a degree in international relations and political science. In his research for the Gray Man novels, including Agent in Place, Gunmetal Gray, Back Blast, Dead Eye, Ballistic, On Target, and The Gray Man, he traveled to more than fifteen countries and trained alongside military and law enforcement in the use of firearms, battlefield medicine, and close-range combative tactics. He is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tom Clancy Support and Defend, Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect, Tom Clancy Commander in Chief, and Tom Clancy True Faith and Allegiance. With Tom Clancy, he coauthored Locked On, Threat Vector, and Command Authority.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter Two

Courtland Gentry sat in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes with his backpack on top of his roll-aboard and both pieces stacked on his lap, much to the confusion of his driver. Normally passengers sat in the back and their luggage rode in the trunk, but Court had hurried off the aircraft and into the front of the car to disrupt any potential surveillance at the FBO, and since the driver didn’t know anything about tradecraft, he thought this American to be some kind of a weirdo.

Court hadn’t seen the two men on the roof, but he saw them now, or at least he saw the black Aurion varying between six and ten car lengths behind his Mercedes, always there, despite the turnoffs, red lights, and off-and-on gridlocked traffic of a Hong Kong workday.

Court had picked up a tail and he hadn’t even been on the ground here in Hong Kong for ten fucking minutes.

Terrific.

He considered bailing out of the Mercedes somewhere en route to his destination to lose the surveillance detail, but he figured this driver was probably an informant for Chinese intelligence, and the man would just pass on the fact that his passenger had, with no warning, dived from his hired car and dashed up some alley.

Nope, that wouldn’t do. Court’s cover for status had to be maintained, which meant Court would just pretend like he didn’t see the black car lurking behind him.

He’d been here to HK before, but only once. To the extent he had a regular beat, East Asia certainly wasn’t it, so he did his best to push the tail car out of his mind and instead spend his time doing all he could to observe the fabric of life on the streets around him. He noted what the police cars looked like, where the street signs were located, the flow of traffic, and the manner of dress of the commuters. He made a mental note of the cardinal positions of several major buildings in view. He’d spent hours of his flight over from the States prepping for his op here, but he’d not had time to digest more than a thumbnail sketch of this area of operations and, as he had learned countless times in the past, not only was the map not the territory, but most preconceived notions about a place were dead wrong.

You really had to experience a location to know it at an operational level.

Court had a lot of work to do to get up to speed, but his assignment here was as time sensitive as they came, so he’d have to work out the atmospherics of this AO while on the job.

His car drove onto the Tsing Yi Bridge, and he glanced back in the passenger-side mirror to confirm that the black Aurion continued to follow. It was in a reasonable position for a tail car; Court gave these boys credit for knowing their stuff, but he had been either the tailer or the tailee thousands of times in his life, so sniffing out a car on his six was nothing to him.

Both vehicles left the bridge, continued south along the water, and finally entered the Hong Kong district of Tsim Sha Tsui, on the southern tip of Kowloon. The black sedan was still back there, which meant to Court this tail on him was a simple affair. There were no teams of vehicles in radio contact leapfrogging all around, which was what he would have expected if mainland China’s Ministry of State Security was working here and had ordered up a large surveillance package on him. Either the guys in the tail car were working for some group not tied to the Chinese intelligence services, or else Chinese intel found him more of a curiosity than a real concern, so they just sent a couple of men to see where he was heading and what he was up to.

Looking away from the mirror, he got his first glimpse of his hotel. The five-star Peninsula Hong Kong sat at the southern tip of Kowloon, just across the street from the harbor ferry terminal. He was anxious to get into his room—not so he could rest after the two-leg, sixteen-hour-long flight from the United States; rather so he could whip out his encrypted phone and call his handler. He would let her know about the surveillance, and he would let her have it, because this bullshit wasn’t his damn fault, and it could ruin this mission before it began.

No, Court told himself. This wouldn’t hurt the op. It couldn’t, because his assignment here was possibly the most important of his life. The potential for gain was exponentially larger than any intelligence haul he’d ever heard of short of wartime.

And lives were on the line, including the life of a man who had saved Court Gentry years ago.

Court told himself he would not fail. Regardless of the hurdles ahead, he would see this through somehow, even if he had these Chinese motherfuckers breathing down his neck for the duration of his assignment.

The Mercedes drove around the fountain in front of the Peninsula and stopped under the awning. A bellman opened the back door, but Court climbed out of the front seat with barely a nod to his driver. He handled his own luggage and passed the attentive bellmen with a curt nod, like he was a businessman who did this every day of his life.

Five minutes later he was checked into his twenty-seventh-floor room. It wasn’t a suite but it was roomy and ornate, certainly nicer than all but a few accommodations Court had ever stayed in, in his life. It came with a dramatic floor-to-ceiling view of Victoria Harbor. Beyond the congested waterway, the massive skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island shot skyward. Past the stunning urban landscape, lush hills dwarfed the buildings, and Victoria Peak, the highest point in HK, was completely hidden by the hidden by the low cloud ceiling.

Twenty-seven floors below, Wang Ping Li and Tao Man Koh sat in a conference room in the administrative office of the Peninsula Hotel, watching silently while the day manager stood and left the room. The man had been angry about informing on one of his guests, and he’d made a show about demanding Wang and Tao’s credentials, but it was only a show, and while both operatives knew they could have filed a report on the manager’s recalcitrance, they weren’t here in HK to gauge the party loyalty of hoteliers.

And anyway, after a little huffing and puffing, the manager was playing ball. He’d already told them that the guest who’d arrived in the Mercedes was traveling under the name Roger Hartley, and he was ostensibly a businessman from Ohio in the United States. The intelligence officers didn’t have the man’s passport to look at; hotels here in Hong Kong, unlike in China proper, were under no obligation to take their guest’s passports, and the five-star properties like the Peninsula distanced themselves from China by not doing so.

But even though on the surface the Peninsula acted high-minded about guests’ rights, in truth Roger Hartley’s room was already bugged with listening devices; most four- and five-star hotels in HK maintained rooms wired by MSS as a matter of course, though the bugs weren’t turned on unless there was a specific need. Tao would make a call to initiate twenty-four-hour monitoring of Hartley’s room now that he had the room number, and he’d follow up hourly with the listeners for updates.

The manager returned with a pair of key cards and handed them over without a word. This would give Tao and Wang access to the room directly across the hall from Hartley; as it happened it had been vacant, but if a guest had been staying there, the annoyed hotel manager would have moved them out under some emergency-repair ruse. Through a pinhole camera Wang and Tao would attach to their door’s peephole they would have a perfect view of Hartley’s door, and through the motion-detector setting on the device they’d be sure they wouldn’t miss him leaving his room.

The manager had also handed over extra copies of cards that would get them into Hartley’s room itself, in case they wanted to make entry when the man was out.

After passing over the key cards, the manager walked the two intelligence operatives out of the conference room and back into the lobby. He bid them an insincere good day, then turned and went back inside.

Tao looked to Wang. “He was disrespectful.”

“No time to make trouble for him. He gets a pass for now. Let’s go to the room.”

Tao nodded, then said, “Should we call in more eyes to assist?”

“Who? Everyone else here is working for Ministry of Defense. When Colonel Dai finds out we’ve been pulled off his operation, he’ll be angry enough. If we start removing others to help us, he’ll lose his mind.”

The two men headed for the elevators. As soon as the door closed, the mobile phone rang in Tao’s jacket. He looked at the incoming number, then immediately handed the phone over to Wang.

“It’s him.”

Wang took the phone from Tao and answered with a report, not even waiting to be asked where the hell they were. “Way ni hao, Shangxio.” Yes, hello, Colonel. “We were ordered by our Beijing Control to divert from your operation here and proceed to the airport. An American CIA Dassault Falcon Seven X, tail number—”

Wang stopped talking abruptly and just listened; Tao could tell he’d been interrupted. The elevator stopped and the two men headed up the hall.

Wang spoke again, more softly now. “Yes, sir. Our orders were made clear to us. We then followed our subject to the Peninsula, and we have taken a room across from—”

He stopped speaking again; Tao could hear the voice of the man through the phone at Wang’s ear.

The two men were already in their room with the door shut when Wang spoke again. “I understand, sir. But this came from our department . . . not yours. Apologies, but despite our seconding to you, our chain of command retains authority to—”

For a third time Wang was interrupted. Tao looked on while Wang listened, nodded compliantly, and ended the call. He looked uncomfortable but made no remarks to his junior colleague.

“What did he say?” Tao finally asked.

The more senior of the two operatives blew out a long sigh. “What do you think? He’s mad we left his op to follow the MSS directive, as if we had a choice.”

Tao was the junior man, but he chanced a comment. “Colonel Dai has his own ass on the line on this operation for some reason. The next call we get from him will be the one ordering us to terminate the subject.”

Wang took off his suit coat, still a little damp from his time on the hot roof at the airport. “He’s after a promotion, or maybe, as you suggest, there is some other reason for his personal involvement. If Dai fails here, it will be men like us who will suffer.”

Tao held up a finger. “No. Not men like us. It will be us, exactly. That’s why we should terminate the CIA man and—”

Wang waved a hand in the air. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, Tao. Get it out of your head. We’re here on a surveillance job for MSS, and then we will go back to being two more good little soldiers for Defense Ministry. Nobody is killing anybody until we find Fan Jiang, or until someone gets in our way.”

Tao said, “Ross Hartley is in Dai’s way already. And Colonel Dai doesn’t mess around.”

 

Chapter Three

Court had spent almost all of the past sixteen hours in the air, minus a short refueling stop in Los Angeles, and he’d worked through nearly all of the flight. He’d known nothing about his assignment when he boarded the Falcon, not even if he would accept it, but before the plane took to the sky he’d read his eyes-only orders and he was fully on board with the mission. And by the time the plane had reached its cruising altitude, Court had sketched out a mental to-do list for the long flight ahead of him.

The flight attendant, herself a CIA employee, had brought him dinner and offered him drinks, but he ate lightly and drank nothing but water and coffee, knowing he needed a plan of action to hit the ground running in HK more than he needed a buzz, a heavy stomach, and some shut-eye.

Now he knew that both jet lag and hunger would kick in before long, but he had more work to do. He opened his carry-on and his backpack and dumped everything out onto the bed. He went through each item slowly and carefully, because he’d not packed these bags himself and none of these belongings were his.

He’d already been through this gear on the plane, but he wanted to go over it again. In addition to clothing and toiletries, it had all manner of mission-specific items, from encrypted mobiles to infrared scopes masked as binoculars. He’d taken only a small portion of the equipment left for him on the Falcon, and now he decided to pare this down even more. Most anything could have a GPS tracker in it these days, and he didn’t want the CIA knowing his exact whereabouts, just in case someone in the CIA had passed on the tip about the plane’s identity and arrival here in the first place.

Now he sat on his bed and searched everything that came off the plane with him.

He knew what he had to do to get back on track. Tonight he would lose his tail, and tomorrow, when no one knew he was the guy who got off that CIA aircraft, he would intentionally pick it back up again, because those were his orders from Langley.

This was going to be a weird op, of this he was certain.

He’d come to meet with a man who had been detained by the Chinese, and since he didn’t know where this man was, the only way find him was to make the Chinese aware of who he was and who he was looking for.

But they could not know he was here on a mission for the CIA, or this whole operation would fall to pieces.

He grabbed a pillow from the bed, stepped into the closet, lay down on the carpet, and fell asleep while the hot Hong Kong day raged on outside.

Several hours later Court sat at the bar at the Felix, an ultra-chic Philippe Starck–designed restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. The view over the harbor was breathtaking; the lights of Hong Kong Island to the south looked like the Manhattan skyline as seen by a helicopter from just a few hundred yards away. In fact, in many ways it was more dramatic; HK was the world’s tallest urban agglomeration, with one building reaching 118 stories and 312 buildings here standing at least 150 yards high, many more than in New York City.

While Court ate a steak and drank a beer at the bar with his back to the windows, forty-four buildings on both sides of Victoria Harbor flashed colors synchronized to music in the nightly Symphony of Lights show. Well-dressed men and women stood at the windows of the Felix and marveled at the spectacle, even though it happened every evening.

Court didn’t turn and look at the lights, and neither did one other man in the room. Tao Man Koh sat at a table near the window high above the harbor and sipped a glass of wine. Through the reflection in the glass next to him he could see the back of the American, and he kept eyes out for anyone who might try to communicate with him in a clandestine fashion.

So far he’d not seen a thing that gave him any impression that Roger Hartley was anything other than a businessman here...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0425282864
• ISBN 13: 9780425282861
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 704