Anthony Fowler is an agent with the CIA.
He is also an agent with the Holy Alliance.
The former of the two organizations is known to all who might be reading this. If like me you are not familiar with the latter, it is the Vatican's secret intelligence service, according to the chronicler of these adventures, or as someone else put it, the Vatican's Secret Service. "It's a small outfit, generally unknown to the public, but active. One of its accomplishments is having saved the life of former Israeli president, Golda Meir, when Islamic terrorists came close to blowing up her plane during a visit to Rome. The medals were awarded to Mossad, but the Holy Alliance didn't care. They take the phrase 'secret service' literally. Only the Pope and a handful of cardinals are officially informed of their work. Among the international intelligence community, the Alliance is respected and feared."
How someone might be connected to both is quite interesting.
Born in 1951, Fowler was the son of a wealthy family who attended Stanford and "graduated magna cum laude at the age of twenty with a degree in Psychology. The youngest in his class. .. On the last day of the term, he collected his things and walked into the university recruitment offices. He wanted to go to Vietnam."
After normal boot training in the Air Force at Lackland, he received "advanced parachute regiment instruction for a Special Ops unit that retrieved downed pilots behind enemy lines" as well guerrila tactics and learning to fly a helicopter. After a tour in Vietnam, he entered a Catholic seminary and was ordained in 1977, subsequently assigned as military chaplain to an air force base in Germany. It is there that he was recruited by the CIA.
"With his language skills it's easy to see why they wanted him: Fowler speaks eleven languages fluently and can get along in fifteen others. But the Company is not the only outfit that recruited him." He was also approached by and accepted by the Holy Alliance.
Fowler is described as "tall and thin in a wiry frame, and noticeably bald. He looked to have lived about ?fty well-preserved years, and his features were forceful, even hard, evidence of many mornings he had spent outdoors watching the sun come up". Elsewhere there is mention of his looking "more like a soldier than a priest." with an "economy of movement and the energy radiating from his green eyes" as well as his usually being "as unflappable as his starched collar".