Winter is an agent for GCHQ.
The British government organization called the Government Communications Headquarters is "an intelligence and security organization responsible for proving signals intelligence and information assurance. It is largely to the U.K. what the NSA is to the U.S. Most of the people working for this agency, largely based in Cheltenham, England, are technicians and analysts, not field agents. Winter is, however, just that.
We get a brief glimpse of her at age 17 at the beginning of the first recorded adventure. There she is described as the highly unusual phrase "sexually omnivorous"; unusual because very few people would really fall into such a category and even fewer who were 17 years old as she was. She was a dreadlocked girl with a nose ring. She was further said to have "long dark lashes, striking green eyes, and sharp angular features". It was said she "had the kind of looks that bypass beautiful and go straight to unobtainable", in short, "not pretty. Spectacular".
She was also said to be exceptional on the snowboard showing superb athletic abilities. She was blessed with a photographic memory and a keen analytical mind. Throw in a good amount of martial arts training and you had physically impressive operative material. But then there was that "omnivorous" reference to her proclivities and the question of whether she was at all manageable came to mind.
Apparently she was because after that brief introduction, the story skips up a decade and she is an extremely experienced and vital agent with that secretive organization. She has during those ten years shown over and over that she lived up to the potential people saw in her back then. She has also proven that the "sexually omnivorous" comment was not unwarranted.
Good Line:
- Concerning the benefit of the Internet to the intelligence communities: "When we found we could hack vibrators, we thought we'd hit nirvana."