Tracie Tanner is an agent with the CIA.
A beautiful, athletic red-haired woman, Tanner has been a solo operative for seven years at the start of the first recorded adventure. She was used to working alone and used to, if anyone ever can be, to "missions in Asian and Middle Eastern countries where being female meant you had no rights".
Approaching the age of 30, Tanner's world was a "solitary, often lonely life, but as the daughter of a four-star U.S. Army general and a career State Department diplomat" she was expected to serve her country and this way was one that suited her temperament and her love of action. She loved travel and she love excitement and while she would never consider herself reckless (others might) she was not adverse to putting herself in danger as she had a confidence that she could get herself out again.
"After graduating Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with a degree in linguistics, Tracie had been recruited into the ranks of the CIA. She had trained for three grueling years, initially at The Farm and then in the field, under a crusty old badass veteran of a quarter-century of covert operations whose real name she still did not know. Then she began working solo missions under her mentor and direct supervisor at CIA, Winston Andrews."
Tanner has no lasting relationships and for the most part really does not miss them that much, or at least that is what she keeps telling herself. At one point she comments to herself that she could count the number of lovers she had had on one hand and still have a couple of fingers available but cannot really conceive of changing her lifestyle. Action and danger is what she did and if that meant she had to do without companionship, she could live without.
The world that Tanner lives and operates in is that of the mid-to-late 80s. The Soviet Union still exists but is on its last legs. The former Warsaw pact nations are rapidly pulling away from the iron control of Moscow but exactly who will win control in each nation's rebirth is still unknown. The KGB is struggling to remain viable and will do anything and everything it has to for survival. Even as many in the West hope for an end to the Cold War, most in the Intelligence community know it will not be an easy death.