Hailey Robson is a freelance agent.
I originally had typed that she was an agent with the CIA then amended it to say that she was not an agent so much as an affiliate, as in she works with the CIA sometimes and sometimes - usually - she does not. But then considering the other things she gets involved in and people she helps, I switched it to freelance.
The other description I almost went with was "nuclear engineer" because she had a job as such for a time having earned a PhD in chemical engineering with a Masters in nuclear power. I turned that one down even though it will come up a whole lot of times in the course of the recorded adventures we have of her; rejected because she sort of stopped that when she got fired.
Our initial meeting of her is as she is leaving the offices of Thule Engineering where she had worked on a nuclear energy project before she found herself fired just two weeks before Christmas and concerned with what a graduate in nuclear engineering might do next for a job. That is when a black limo pulls up, "half a dozen large men in sunglasses and dark suits" surround her, and she is 'invited' (okay, picked up and deposited inside said limo) to take a trip with them to CIA headquarters.
If you are getting confused, you are in good but contented company and should just go with the flow otherwise you will get muddled big time.
You see, she is shanghaied to Langley because her father was concerned with what she was up to and he is a person pretty high up in that organization and he also wanted to be able to tell his wife - her mother - what was happening because I believe (not sure) that she is even higher up the chain than he and that's pretty high. But Ms. Robson is 25 years old and can take care of herself, as she politely but sternly reminds him and then leaves.
That is when she will be approached by a side group in the Agency to work on their nuclear project and that was before she was kidnapped by the Russian agent who wanted her to defect to work on their nuclear project and after that, things get stranger.
Oh, just in case you were wondering, through all this, Robson does not show much alarm, partly because she has been trained from a very early age to take care of herself - what with both mom and dad being former field agents - and she knows how good she can be.