Andrew '
Azo' Coke is a part-time agent with British Intelligence.
He isn't when we first meet him, though he will get his chance soon after. Our intro to him is when he is barely making ends meet while earning a meager living as a bicycle-riding pizza delivery man but a very bad day turned into an even worse night when he is roundly provoked while dropping a pizza at a Liverpool pub and ended up in jail and looking at a stretch there.
Coke has an impressive sized chip on his shoulder which routinely manifests itself as a desire to break someone's nose, an act with which he has some experience. This quick-to-anger is obviously a problem that Coke has to deal with every day but considering his upbringing, he comes by it honestly. His father, from whom he got his dark complexion which gets him slurs about being a Paki or some other ethnic group the insulter is angry with that day, disappeared when he was still quite little. He has only a brief memory of his father and then the man was gone. His mother routinely said she was always looking for him and then one day she never came back.
Then there is Leanne who took a fancy to him a few years before, had a dalliance or two and then got pregnant and began to make Coke's not-so-pleasant life far worse. She was angry with him all the time even though they were not together and since she was smarter than he, in Coke's opinion, she routinely got the better result in a fight. But at least she gave him Ali. The little boy was the only bright spot in Cokes's life. And it will be because of Ali and the desire to not have visiting rights taken away that he will go along with the man from the government.
"Do this one thing for me and I will make all your troubles go away." That was not the exact wording but was the meaning to the offer that Paterson, the government man, made to a very downbeat Coke and Coke took him at his word because the alternative was time in prison and never seeing Ali again. Of course, the promise hinged on Paterson being a man of his word, something that Coke will have reason to doubt. Over and over, he will have good reason to not trust Paterson.