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Agent in Place (Gray Man)

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The book was published in 1991, but it has a sort-of renewed timeliness in these days of an American president apparently entangled in some Russian spy games himself.

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. 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. Obviously, it did all work out, and Greaney speaks very highly of his agent. In fact, he told me an interesting story about how he ended up creating the Gray Man and introducing readers to Court Gentry, a process that came to be through writing a different book that was never published. Two months after his CIA operation in Hong Kong, freelance mercenary Court Gentry is hired for a contract job in Paris by a group of Syrian exiles through former French intelligence officer Vincent Voland. His job is to kidnap Bianca Medina, a Spanish fashion model and Syrian President Ahmed al-Azzam's mistress, and then deliver her to the exiles so that they can gather information from her about a secret meeting between President Azzam and the Supreme Leader of Iran, in which she was present. They believe that the revelation of Azzam's secret talks with the Iranians, in which he permitted them to build military bases in Syria, would anger the Russians, who were his allies in the civil war, for betrayal; this would then cause discord among the three parties and lead to the destabilization of Azzam's regime.

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In his second outing as a now un-disavowed asset for the CIA, Court Gentry, "the Gray Man," becomes involved in a plot to aid Syrian expatriates trying to topple their dangerous dictator. He helps kidnap the dictator's mistress when she is in France and get her to the rebels, but discovers she will help no one unless she is reunited with her infant son. The baby has been kept secret by both the mistress and the dictator (who, by the way, is not named Bashar al-Assad), but without him she will not cooperate, no matter what the people holding her try to do. Supporters of the Free Syrian Army are in exile in Paris. They are well funded and are focused on bringing down Syrian President Ahmed Azzam (aka Bashar al-Assad). They learn that Ahmed has a mistress, who is a Spanish model and modeling in Paris. Arrangements are made with Court Gentry to kidnap Bianca Medina, as they know that she knows about a meeting taken in Tehran, that should the Russians discover, perhaps would end the dictatorship of Ahmed.

Try to decompose the different steps, move or turn needed to build a square. player.onChat("square", function () { After convincing Court to work with them one last time, mostly to help Bianca because he sympathizes with her and the situation she’s in, Gentry heads to Syria for the most dangerous assignment in his storied career.

It is always ambitious to place your story in the midst of constantly changing current events and that gamble pays off handsomely here, taking the reader on a journey into the very belly of the Syrian Civil War with all of the different factions and players including mercenaries, the Free Syrian Army, Isis, the Russians, and others too numerous to mention without glancing at the scorecard. Maybe Court takes on an impossible mission - but the writing makes it believable and the battle scenes in Syria are real good. Court delivers Bianca Medina to the rebels, but his job doesn't end there. She soon reveals that she has given birth to a son, the only heir to Azzam's rule—and a potent threat to the Syrian president's powerful wife. Full Force and Effect was a fun one because the research was fascinating to do, and I got the book in on time, so my blood pressure stayed nice and low. So, yeah, that was probably my favorite.”

Alexis manages to get his hands on the entire memorandum, including an analysis that reveals the identity of NATO's highest-ranking "agent in place" in Moskow. Will that agent be able to escape from Moskow before the KGB comes for him? The book is well written and plotted. The pace is very fast with constant action. This a series that has each book capable of being a stand-alone book. It is obvious Greaney does a lot of research to make his books accurate politically, weaponry, spy craft and also the geography. The characters are interesting and realistic. I am always amazed at Greaney’s ability to write such intricate plots. He is a master storyteller.

For those wondering which of Tom Clancy’s books is his favorite, Greaney admitted it’s a tough question to answer. 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.” 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. For those who didn’t know, Greaney has flirted with Hollywood several times in the past. He opened up about all that, revealing that he read several different version of various scripts, which were all attached to a Gray Man movie at one point or another.

It’s hard to divorce yourself from the books that did really well and were successful when they came out, but weren’t always that fun to write. I mean, they still turned out really good or whatever, but like the last Clancy book I did, True Faith and Allegiance, it’s the highest rated of all the ones I wrote, and I didn’t have a ton of fun writing it because of other things going on. I had surgeries taking place, rushed to get it done, and all these things were going on. It was one of the only books where I wasn’t able to travel to do research for it like virtually all the other books I’ve done. I wrote the thing on my couch with my leg elevated. So in a way, to me, because of all that, I hate that book even though it turned out good.”Dr. Tarek Halaby: Cardiac surgeon, co-director of the Free Syria Exile Union, husband of Rima Halaby Greaney also explained that this book is different from previous books because “Court’s motivations are different this time out. He has new allies and new enemies, and you’ll meet some new characters you can expect to see in later installments.” An Agent in Place is set almost entirely in Moscow in the mid-1980s. Glasnost is afoot, but the CIA spymasters don't want the Cold War to end and put them out of work, so they set in motion a scheme designed to take down Gorbachev. The scheme involves a few US Embassy officials and a Russian family: the poet Zenaida, her "soon-to-be-ex-husband" Vadim, and her elderly father and 11-year-old son.

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