Kiki Claymore is an agent with Task Force Ten.
Task Force Ten is a small specialized intelligence gathering division inside NATO, answerable only to a select committee inside that organization and not to any particular member country. While its primary function is intel procurement, it also has a highly effective and dangerous enforcement arm which can get into places they were not meant to and can fight their way back out again.
When we first meet this very much alive and lively young woman, she has a part-time job for NATO as a typist, a not very exciting job that allows her to see very little and do even less but it does afford her the opportunity to live in Amsterdam and that is for her a lot better than Ottawa, Canada where she was born and raised. That life is about the change drastically.
It seems being a spy runs in her family and when her grandfather, Angus, a Scotsman who turns out was a legendary operative. Claymore did not know that but soon learned it and other things, too.
And suddenly she was part of Task Force Ten. She really did not want to be. And her fellow operatives did not want her to be. And her new bosses most certainly did not want it. And things were about to get worse.
Claymore is half-Scottish and half-Japanese. Those who meet her acknowledge that she is every bit as smart as she is beautiful, and she is quite lovely, but to many she comes across as flighty. It could just be that they hear only irreverence and not insight in her questions. For instance, when she is first told of the existence of Task Force Ten, her initial question was, "Why ten? What happened to one through nine?"
The small group of operative that Claymore will join is all female and all hired because they can fight. They, of course, have to be smart and resourceful and flexible and determined but mostly Digby, the man in charge of them, insists that they be able to fight. While like the newcomer in most established groups, Claymore's ability are suspect, she knows how to fight. Aikido or karate, she is very, very good. And she has other talents as well.