Court Gentry is a former CIA-trained assassin, now operating independently, selling his skills to the highest bidder. He is so good that he is a complete ghost, or chameleon; the apocryphal “Gray Man”. He performs a perfect mission killing the Nigerian energy minister at Syria, and is heading to his extraction point.
His handler, Sir Donald Fitzroy, is approached by another former CIA agent, a lawyer named Lloyd representing a french conglomerate. He has kidnapped Sir Donald’s family, and instructs him to have the Gray Man killed. Sir Donald reluctantly gives the order, but the Gray Man escapes and makes his way to Europe.
Lloyd, meanwhile, has roped in teams of intelligence agency assassins from a dozen countries and puts a bounty of $20 million on Court. Court runs into several of these teams along the way, and eliminates each of them with his superior skill. He is betrayed by a forger to the CIA, but manages to escape that too.
When he encounters resistance at a secret weapons cache known only to him and Sir Donald, he deduces that Sir Donald is being blackmailed, or coerced. He then works his way to Normandy, where Sir Donald’s family is being held, and rescues them, eliminating every other assassin team in the process.
Standard pot-boiler, with marginal character development but chock-full of heart-pounding action and brief moments of introspection, where Court contemplates the life choices that led him to this perilous point. All told, a gripping thriller and an insight into the morally gray world of espionage and intelligence, where corporate interests supersede national ones.