Edwin Hoff is an agent with ASP.
That acronym stands for the Association to Protect, a super secret organization made up of former special forces, especially Delta, personnel who meet very exacting criteria - they must be alone. No family to ask about them, no ties to hold them to anything, no one to care if they just did not show up the next day or ever again.
This anonymity was needed for two reasons. The first most obvious one considering how incredibly dangerous their jobs were is that they are likely to get themselves killed on any mission. The second is a lot more difficult to grasp. Agents of ASP are given an identity and a location to live. They stay there for an unknown period of time, often going on short missions and then resuming their 'day job'. But there always comes a point in time when their Head, the aged leader of the organization, decides they have 'lived' in that identity long enough and they are told to lose it. The operative walks away from that life and anyone he or she met and never comes back, starting all over in another place with another name. Why is not really explained to them (or to the reader).
One big downside to working with ASP, besides the no-friends policy, is that should ASP decide the agent had violated the rules or had become a threat to ASP clandestine nature, that agent would get RUPD which is another acronym for "find and eliminate this man on site". It is implied that once such a notice was issued, it might be delayed for a while but then would always be carried out.
Hoff is the identity we meet the character as and he will keep it for the adventures we have of him. He had supposedly been other people before, certainly his original name which we are never told, but when we first meet him, he had been Hoff for over three years. During that time he had shown his tremendous intellect by helping create a tech company named D6 and a revolutionary system of computer and appliance interconnectivity that during the heady days of the dot-com boom had made him a billionaire. This all takes place just before 9/11 but the action starts on that fateful day.
Hoff is described as a somewhat stocky 5'9" tall and "at first glance, physically average. This was a covert asset. He was unreasonably strong for his size, and an efficient swimmer." Further, "Raptor had excelled during his tours in increasingly elite Special Forces not because of his raw strength alone, but that together with his sheer determination and uncanny strategic intelligence. With unshakable focus on his goal, Raptor always won." Throw in his photographic memory and incredible tenacity and you have one dangerous agent.