Jim 'Zig' Zigarowski is a mortician.
Nola Brown is a sergeant in the U.S. Army.
Neither of these two are spies in any capacity and neither has any inclination to be so. In the two adventures (so far) which exist about them, neither of them seek that kind of work. Unfortunately for their safety, a good number of people they will come across are so employed and those people do not like outsiders learning about their activities.
Zig and Nola are not friends or colleagues. They are not related to each other. Their paths would not have merged in the least except for a brief moment a decade before the events of these adventures. In that short instance, a young Nola was a Girl Scout attending a camping expedition that Zig was also attending as a chaperone for his own daughter, Maggie. In a bizarre campfire explositon, Nola would save Maggie's life, losing the tip of her ear in the process. After that night, Zig and Nola would not see each other again until the circumstances of the first adventure.
Nola, 26 when the tales begin, is the Army's Artist-in-Residence. "It's one of the Army's most prestigious honors; dates back to World War I and runs through every battle since - Normandy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, you name it. Anywhere we've stormed the beaches, we've had a painter there". Photographers, we learn, can document these events. Artists can capture them.
Zig is 52. "For well over a decade, Zig had spent his days working in this high-tech surgical room, which served as a mortuary for the US government's most top secret and high-profile cases. On 9/11, the victims of the Pentagon attack were brought here. So were the victims of the attack on the USS Cole, the astronauts from the space shuttle Columbia, and the remains of well over fifty thousand soldiers and CIA operatives who fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and every secret location in between. Here, in Delaware of all places, at Dover Air Force Base, was America's most important funeral home". It is Zig's job to help reconstruct the bodies of the fallen so they can be properly honored by family members before final burial.
It is when the body of a young woman named Nola Brown is sent to Zig to prepare that their adventures begin. Zig remembers the young girl who saved his daughter and insists on being the one to process her remains. It is when he notices that the ear which had been damaged in the incident years before is intact that Zig becomes part of a fascinating mystery. Who was the dead girl? Where is the real Nola? Why are people trying so hard to close down any investigation, pressure coming from as high as the White House?
Zig and Nola are not trained operatives. They are just being hunted by them.