Maggie Jenkins is an analyst with the CIA.
Well, she was, for a fair number of years and will sort of be again as the stories progress. When we first encounter her, though, she is heading into work on Capitol Hill, taking the elevator to the Crypt just down the hall from the House Intelligence Committee office where she put in far more than 40 hours a week because there was always something vital to be researched. The time frame for these activities is just over a year after the invasion of Iraq and the hunt for Saddam Hussein. Now her job responsibilities include making sure that the Chairman of that House committee had an up-to-date intelligence briefing book ready before any scheduled hearings.
It will not be any of the constant and important work she was doing on the Hill that will take Jenkins from a safe job as Congressional Intelligence analyst to working out in the field in far away countries like Georgia. It will be the death of her fiancé in a explosion of a bomb left by an assassin at a cafe in Tbilisi. Steve Ryder, the man she was scheduled to marry as soon as he got back from his several month stint in that region off the Black Sea, had been meeting a contact when both were killed. Jenkins would certainly have slowly started the grieving over her loss and eventually moved on with her life except for the unbelievable (to her at least) rumor that Ryder might have actually been selling secrets to a foreign power. Jenkins' misery turns quickly to anger at the thought of her loved one's reputation being tarnished so badly and when it became obvious nothing was being done to rectify that, she chooses to do so herself.
It is important to remember as we watch her make this transition from analyst to unofficial field operative that she may not be trained per se in clandestine work but she is a very intelligent woman with years of experience sifting through tons of superfluous data to winnow out the important facts. And once she is out there, she discovers, as do those back at Langley, that she is pretty good at it; this though not being universally well received at the CIA. Some answers, she finds, just raise more questions that others do not want asked.