Guy Bowman is a part-time agent with the Bureau.
When we meet him, the second time, he is a truck driver stopped at a Liverpool truck stop for a rest. It will be a short time thereafter before an old friend and former commander will ask him to give up his time behind the wheel for something a whole lot more dangerous; stepping back into the type of work he did for too many years before he had had enough.
I mention 'second time' because our initial view of him is a captured soldier being tortured for who knows how long by an unnamed enemy, his unforgiving abuser being a very nasty woman named Eva. That all was a flashback to 16 years before the main events but will give an idea of the danger and the troubles Bowman faced in his previous career.
In that earlier life, which the 35-ish-year-old Bowman had left three years before, he had worked mostly for a fellow named Captain Scott. This man, who refers to his small organization inside the British intelligence community as the Bureau (no relation to the American FBI), has an interesting take on the clandestine world he works in: "Intelligence security, at least as it's practiced by our existing agencies, is a busted flush. When I commission operations nowadays I use a modus-operandi outside anything MI6 or the CIA would likely sanction. Theirs is a blown world, fatally compromised. When everyone uses the same methods, the same protocols, the same people, it becomes wise to do something else. Play a longer game, as it were." He further adds this chilling aspect to the enemies he fights, "I'm running an operation that confronts an evil so malign it undermines what you and I consider the civilized world".
Bowman had worked in the shadowy black-ops world for well over a decade and had tired of the constantly fighting and killing and had said goodbye to it to find the much simpler and calmer work of cross-country trucking. He knew his days behind a big-rig wheel was over when Scott came calling.