Anastasia 'Anya' Robertovna Burinkova is an agent with the American DOJ.
That, obviously, stands for the Department of Justice. Exactly which of the many groups inside that large bureaucracy I do not know but it is one dedicated to bringing down the ever-growing Russian mafiya in the States.
She becomes an operative for that government agency after she was given no choice really in the matter. She was first apprehended after killing two men in Saint Augustine, Florida, using a knife with very impressive skill and speed to end their lives in a matter of a couple of seconds before "like so many times before, [she] would become the night and dissolve into the wind". Well, almost. A bad jester might say she was shocked into working with them, in that after tracking her for a bit and watching but not stopping her dispatching those men, several agents brought her down with tasers, though it took more than one to overcome her ferocity; and not all those involved in the apprehension lived to talk about it.
During the interrogation after her capture, she is told her choices were to face prison time for the deaths of those people or to work with her new handler, Ray White. She obviously chose the latter.
We first meet Burinkova in the pages of the adventures of , an operative with an unnamed American intelligence organization. It was shortly into the 2000's when the highly dangerous Burinkova has her first run-in with Fulton and that adventure will result in some unpleasantries - she will slice his tongue with a knife and he will shoot her in the foot, depriving her of one of her little toes. The relationship will improve considerably from there.
For a while, at least. He was working for an American Intelligence organization and she was Russian SVR. She had been trained by the KGB shortly before the Wall came down and the Soviet Union soon after dissolved into the Russian Federation. The KGB itself transformed into the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR) and she was one of its very best assassins.
As Fulton tells it at one point, Burinkova was "a KGB-trained veteran of the Russian SVR who'd been dispatched to infiltrate my team and feed intelligence back to the Kremlin. That plan fell apart for Red Square when Anya and I fell in love, leading to her defection to the United States. Her skill set included the mastery of edged weapons and hand-to-hand combat. She could shoot as well as any member of my team, but she preferred the silence and intimacy of a knife. She'd proven to be a powerful asset; however, her inability to work as anything other than a one-woman army left her unpredictable and often detrimental to our team's mission."
After Fulton and she had a parting of ways, about which he would say, "Her physical beauty was undeniable, but the monster behind the mask of allure terrified and repulsed me", she came to the attention of the section of the DOJ and would be caught and given that choice mentioned above.
The tall, lean-figured Burinkova with her "hypnotic blue-gray eyes" and her "golden hair cascading across [a] bullet-scarred shoulder" was not working with the Americans fighting Russian mobsters. She was supposedly now part of a team. The team would find that Burinkova would always be her own woman.
One of Fulton's line about her says a lot, "Anya ... well, Anya was impossible to explain".