Nick Winter is a freelance agent.
His specialty is finding bad people and helping stop their usually evil actions. "My rules were simple. No domestic matters, no killing of women and children, and cash up front. I was no vigilante or bounty hunter, though. My targets were killers, terrorists and the top brass in organized crime. People governments wanted found, but not necessarily returned, if you know what I mean."
Winter tells us at the beginning of the first recorded adventure that he is working as a "tracker and finder of terrorists for the highest bidder". Our introduction to him comes as he is in India on a contract for three basic reasons: 1) his funds ran low and the money they offered was good, 2) India was hot and London was cold, and 3) there was international tennis and a cricket test-match in Mumbai. Such are the kind of reasons Winter uses for taking an assignment.
Winter is the offspring of a British Army officer and a woman from the Kashmir region. He "grew up with a love for languages and sport" and might have headed in either direction for a career but instead tried the military like his much decorated father. It didn't take, though, for while his father "loved the discipline and order of the army", the son definitely did not.
"I loved the army, and everything that went with it, especially the weapons training. Guns, knives, and hand to hand combat, I mastered them all. The physicality of training was like a drug and I went at it like someone on a permanent high. The only thing I couldn't deal with was taking orders, a critical aspect to surviving the army."
The army in question here, however, was the South African Defence Force as Winter, though born in the U.K., completed his schooling in Cape Town and signed up with conscription called. While he would not remain with the military, "it was in the African bush that I learnt how to track people. The local San people were masters in the art of tracking, surveillance and counter surveillance". He learned all that he possibly could.
He got his start in his current occupation as a result of an approach by the SASS, or South African Secret Service. Though he never actually became an agent, he was affiliated with them. His strong anti-apartheid attitude was attractive to the government out to round up and bring to justice apartheid criminals who fled to Europe and Australia". He worked for them for several years. When the work wound down and the group he was connected to was finally dissolved, Winter "went to London to set myself up as an independent contractor".
We learn from an intro on Winter that he is "a keen scholar in Eastern history, religion and politics". He is "scarred by racial prejudice due to his mixed British/Indian parentage". And three interesting facts that will pay a part in his adventures: he "doesn't like taking orders, doesn't like confined spaces, and definitely doesn't like being taken for a fool".