Angela Martinelli is an agent with the CIA.
It is important to note right away three important facts concerning the activities of Martinelli. The first is that they take place 'in the near-future' so as you read these adventures, jump ahead in your mind a few years (not many). The second is that she is given prime marquee position here [by me] because of the many participants in these thrillers she is the spy that qualifies the tales for membership; she is not the only main character and lots will happen without her involvement but she is definitely a major player in the events. The third is that these tales are the forerunners to a set of adventures taking place much later in time called the Last Brigade where the world is quite a bit different, and not for the better. What I mean is shown by the name given the tales that Martinelli is in: the Collapse.
We meet Martinelli for the first time some way into the initial adventure as the global situation is becoming quite dire. In that meeting we are given a lot of information about her, told to people she is just meeting so that they can see she is someone to pay attention to and it gives we readers an good deal of data on her history.
We learn that she is "has a unique history. She is an operating room nurse, a bio-statistician, and a linguist. For several years, she's gone undercover and volunteered with various international medical outreach organizations, which frequently sent her to areas of conflict".
When asked to tell her own professional story, she reveals, "I served with Operation Smile, Project Hope, and Medecines san Frontieres. I've been to Indonesia, Thailand, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Djibouti, South Korea, and various Pacific Island nations. Most of those deployments were actually undercover ops, which were undertaken to investigate human trafficking, whether for sex or labor. Maybe the assignment most applicable to this conversation was with a humanitarian team which went to Iran in 2004, after their big earthquake. I just happened to find myself in the midst of a sex trafficking operation, which was involved in running girls from Afghanistan and Burma to India."
This all says a lot about the capabilities of Martinelli, leaving out one fact that we are also told about. Martinelli has a particularly impressive knack with languages. In each of her postings, she has been able to become fluent in the native tongues giving her a long list of languages she is good with.
Martinelli is described as "dark-haired, petite", said to be no more than "a couple of inches over five feet". Her smile revealed a pair of deep, and appealing, dimples. She is personable and easy to get to like but she has a toughness that no one should overlook. The last is very important because the sort of things she will have to deal with as things fall down around her are pretty intense.