Jess Montgomery is an analyst for the NAII.
That acronym stands for the North American Intelligence Institute, a private though (I believe) largely government-funded think tank located in Washington, DC. It has a nice set of offices in the nation's capital except for the fact that from the description it had "a not so lovely view of the back of a cluster of office buildings. If [one] stood up, [one] could see the tip of the Capitol building, but that was it in terms of view".
As an FBI agent in the know says cryptically when asked about the NAII, "they are one of the organizations that do a lot more for us than just think, if you know what I mean".
According to Charlie Burns, the Executive Director and her boss at the NAII, Montgomery "was his best analyst. There was no one that even came close to her ability to piece together chunks of information that weren't connected and make sense of them." His admiration for her is based on her superb skills at taking large amounts of data, sifting through it, and coming up with threats to deal with and answers to questions asked by the organization's many clients. For example, when we first meet her, she was wrapping up a presentation for the Navy dealing with "an analysis of ongoing border threats, both from the north and south and how US waterways and territorial waters were being used to allow sex traffickers, cartels, and most importantly, terrorists and espionage into the United States". Montgomery has been with the NAII for several years by the time we first meet her.
Montgomery is in her mid-30s at the time of that first meeting; single though that will change. Though her work was for a DC company, she was given leeway to work from home in the Tucson area - desirable for her but an annoyance for her boss.