Nick Curry, aka the Scorpion, is an agent with the CIA.
He is a contract agent which for the Agency means deniability and separation in the event of trouble. For the Scorpion, it means he is on his own and while he can call upon various stations to provide assistance, he knows better than to expect he will actually get it. In the very shadowy world that the Scorpion inhabits, everyone has a hidden agenda and cooperation has a high price.
As with many contract agents in fiction, the Scorpion is hated or at least disliked by many in the organization because he is not a team player, is sometimes viewed as just a mercenary, and is largely uncontrollable. For his part, the Scorpion is aware that it is his neck on the chopping block, not theirs, realizes he has no retirement package awaiting him should he be lucky enough to live that long, and chafes under the fact that he is often less than what he truly needs to know all in the name of security.
Born out of an unlikely and untenable union between a fun-loving mother and a handsome though poor oil wildcatter, Nick Curry lived with his fairly wealthy grandparents while momma partied. When she was killed in an accident, they were his only parents as dad had been forbidden to enter the homestead. At a still young age, though, dad showed up and grabbed the boy to travel with him. Their lives together were exciting and fun and very educational for the sharp and athletic boy.
That life was cut short when a band of marauders attacked the oil drilling operation in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and killed everyone they saw. The bandits did not see young Curry. Shortly a band of nomads under the leadership of Sheikh .... came by and found the carnage and the nearly dead boy. With little to go back to, the boy accepted the offer of living with the nomads and spent the rest of his childhood with the Bedouin travelers. He learned to survive in the desert and to track and hunt and shoot with incredible accuracy. He also learned a code of honor that made him help those in need but also strike viciously at his enemies.
Reaching adulthood, Curry knew he needed to leave the desert to return to his native land. With considerable sadness, he said his goodbyes and traveled back to the States where he entered college. Soon the draft would come and pull him to the jungles of Vietnam where his fighting skills were honed even more by different people with different ways to kill. He took to all of them with uncanny adeptness.
After his service, the chance to return to his real home, the arid heat of the Middle East was presented by the Agency who wanted to make use of his awesome talents at killing and surviving. He left behind his old identity of Nick Curry for the obscurity of the codename Scorpion, one originally given him as a nickname by his adopted Bedouin father. Soon that term of endearment became the name whispered in the alleys of Riyadh, Cairo, Beirut, and others as belonging to a man deserving of fear.