Agent in Place (Gray Man, Band 7) - Softcover

Greaney, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451488938 ISBN 13: 9780451488930

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

The Gray Man is back in another nonstop international thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels

Fresh off his first mission back with the CIA, Court Gentry secures what seems like a cut-and-dried contract job: A group of expats in Paris hires him to kidnap the mistress of Syrian dictator Ahmed Azzam to get intel that could destabilize Azzam's regime.

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.

Now, to get Bianca's cooperation, Court must bring her son out of Syria alive. With the clock ticking on Bianca's life, he goes off the grid in a free-fire zone in the Middle East--and winds up in the right place at the right time to take a shot at bringing one of the most brutal dictatorships on earth to a close...

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Greaney is the New York Times bestselling author of Gunmetal Gray, Back Blast, Dead Eye, Ballistic, On Target, The Gray Man, Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect, Tom Clancy Support and Defend, Tom Clancy Commander in Chief, and Tom Clancy True Faith and Allegiance. With Tom Clancy he is a coauthor of Locked On, Threat Vector, and Command Authority.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2018 Mark Greaney

 

Chapter One

One week earlier

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise is the most visited cemetery in the world, but the Paris landmark was all but deserted on this rainy, gray, and cool weekday morning. An elderly couple fed squirrels on the cobblestones; a dozen young people stood solemnly in front of Jim Morrison’s fenced-off but simple plot. A group of German hipsters lounged among the graves surrounding Oscar Wilde’s tomb, and a lone man took photos of the statue of Euterpe, the muse of music, as she wept above composer Frédéric Chopin’s mausoleum.

There might have been seventy-five visitors in all on the property, but the cemetery spread over one hundred hilly and wooded acres, so anyone who wanted privacy could find it easily here in the warren of tombs, crypts, cobblestoned lanes, and old oak.

And one man had done just that. A dark-complected fifty-five-year-old with thinning gray hair old sat alone a few rows up the hill from Molière’s tomb, on a small bench that one had to either know about or stumble upon to locate. His name was Dr. Tarek Halaby, and there wasn’t much about the man to make him stand out from the average Parisian of Middle Eastern descent, although someone with knowledge of fashion might pick up on the fact that his raincoat was a Kiton that ran north of two thousand euros, and they therefore might come to the quite reasonable assumption that this was a man of significant means.

As he sat there in the stillness of the cemetery, Halaby pulled out his wallet and looked at a small photo he kept there. A young man and a young woman standing together, smiling into the lens, with hope and intelligence in their eyes that said the future was theirs to command.

For twenty seconds Halaby stared at the photo, till drops of rain began to fall, splashing on the image and blurring the smiling faces.

He dried the photo off with this thumb, put his wallet back in his coat, and looked up to the sky. He lifted his umbrella and got ready to pop it open, but then the phone he’d placed on the bench next to him buzzed and lit up.

He forgot about the impending shower, put down the umbrella, and read the text.

Crematorium. Alone. Lose the goons.

The man in the raincoat sat up straighter and looked around nervously. He saw no one: only tombs and gravestones and trees and birds.

Cold sweat formed on the back of his collar.

He stood, but before he began walking he sent a reply.

I am alone.

A new text appeared and the man in the raincoat felt his heart pummel the inside of his chest.

Two men with guns in their coats at the entrance. Two more fifty meters east of you. They go . . . or I go.

Dr. Halaby stared at the phone a moment before typing out his reply with fingers that trembled.

Of course.

He placed a call, held the phone to his ear, and spoke in French. “He sees you, and he won’t do this with you here. Take the others, go get a coffee, and wait for my call.” A pause. “It’s fine.”

The man ended the call, slipped the phone into his raincoat, and began walking up the hill towards the crematorium.

Five minutes later Dr. Halaby held his umbrella over his head while he walked through the steady rain. The huge crematorium of Père-Lachaise was higher on the hill, another sixty meters on, but Halaby was still making his way through the narrow passages between the tall mausoleums all around. As he advanced, his eyes fixed on another man, himself holding an umbrella. He appeared around the side of the huge crematorium, then stepped into a parking lot between Halaby and the building. Halaby expected the man to continue in his direction, so he was surprised when he instead climbed into a small work truck and drove off to the west.

Halaby was doubly surprised to hear a voice behind him now, not three meters away, coming from a recess between a pair of crypts.

“Stop there. Don’t turn around.” The man spoke English, softly, his voice barely louder than the sound of rain hitting Halaby’s umbrella.

“As you say,” the doctor replied, standing still now, doing his best to keep his hands from shaking. He was partially shielded on three sides by the marble walls of crypts, and in front of him row after row of waist-high tombstones jutted from the wet grass.

The voice behind him said, “You brought it?”

Halaby was Syrian, he lived in France, but his English was good. “As instructed. It is in my front pants pocket. Shall I reach for it?”

“Well . . . I’m not putting my hand down your pants.”

“Yes.” Tarek Halaby reached into his pocket slowly and retrieved a blue badge in a plastic case hanging from a lanyard. There was also a folded sheet of paper with an address on it. He held both items back over his shoulder. “The badge will get you into the event. VIP access. As you know, there is no photo. You will have to provide that yourself.”

The man behind him took the badge and the paper. “Anything new to report?”

Halaby detected the American accent now, and he knew this was, for certain, the man who had come so highly recommended. He didn’t know much about the American other than his reputation. He had been told that this asset was a legend in the world of espionage and covert ops, so of course he would be thorough in his preparations, exacting in his demands.

Halaby replied, “All is the same as in the information you were given yesterday.”

“Security around the target?”

“As you were told. Five men.”

“And the threat?”

“Also the same as before. No more than four hostiles. Five, at most.”

“Five is more than four.”

Now Halaby swallowed. “Yes . . . well . . . I was told probably just four hostiles, so the intelligence is not certain. But it is no worry, because the hostiles will not act until tomorrow, and you will proceed tonight. Won’t you?”

The asset did not answer the question. “And the target? Still departing France tomorrow?”

“This is unchanged. The flight leaves at one p.m. Again, tonight is the last night where we can—”

“The address written on this paper. Is this the RP?”

“The . . . the what?”

“The rally point.”

“I’m sorry. I do not know what this means.”

Halaby thought he heard a soft sigh of frustration from the other man. Then, “Is this where I go when it’s done?”

“Oh . . . Yes. It is the address of our safe house here in Paris.”

There was a longer pause now. A grackle landed on a tombstone just a few meters in front of the man with the umbrella, and the rain picked up even more.

Finally the American asset spoke again, but his voice sounded less sure than before. “The man I talked to on the phone. He was French. You are not French.”

“The one who you spoke with, the one who hired you through the service in Monte Carlo . . . he works for me.”

Halaby heard soft wet footsteps and then the American came into view around the umbrella. He was in his thirties, a touch shorter than Halaby’s six feet, with a dark beard and a simple black raincoat. The hood hung low over his eyes; rainwater dripped off it in front of his face.

The American said, “You are Dr. Tarek Halaby, aren’t...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451488938
• ISBN 13: 9780451488930
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 528
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland