Case and Kat are agents of IACS.
Pronounced Eye-Axe, that acronym for which the expansion is never given (or is so cleverly hidden I could not find it) points to "Britain's most secret cyber agency". MI5 and MI6 are the two best known security and intelligence organizations that the United Kingdom had. GCHQ, though considerably bigger in manpower than the two combined, was far more covert and, while still known, mysterious. IACS, on the other hand, was almost invisible personified when it came to notoriety but it was most definitely there when cyber-security and cyber-intelligence were called for. Not to mention cyber-warfare if needed.
"IACS operated in the interzone between physical kinetic operations and the cyber world", is one way it was put to us. "When terrorists use cyber attacks and lethal bioweapons, who is going to defend you? Keyboard warriors? Intelligence officers? Special-forces operators? More often than the public knows, we need them all. Sometimes the cyber geek, the spy and the fighter are the same man. Or woman."
If IACS seems particularly determined to keep its full name a mystery, the same would go for its two best agents. Case and Kat are the only names we are given for this pair of operatives. We do not even know for sure if those two names are the first or last names, if either. Kat, the senior of the two, is likely a nickname but that is speculation. With Case, we are pretty sure that is shortening of something else as one person noted, "she had finally given up on his first name, and simply called him Case like everybody else".
As indicated, Case is the junior partner and is the one always given grief by Kat for a variety of reasons but likely just because she could. He came to IACS by way of the Royal Signal Corps. While that might give visions of men and women safely behind solid walls monitoring and analyzing communications to help soldiers out in the field, that would not hold true for Case. As an instructor of his had pointed out early in his training, "You can wreak havoc with a keyboard but sometimes it has to be the enemy's own keyboard in the heart of their fortified domain". That resulted in getting people like Case trained in all manners of cyberactivity but also trained in how to get into and out of those fortifications; preferably undetected so the enemy did not know that their secrets were compromised.
About Kat there is considerably less to be said about her background. "Eurasian features with Irish-pale skin and eyes like polished copper" was the first description of her given - that and the fact that the first two knuckles of each hand were enlarged and it was not by accident. She is a bit of an enigma though the fact that she seemed most alive when riding her motorcycle says a lot about her. She had also served for a time in the military but what and when remains unknown.
The two work wonderfully together - if you ignore the verbal jabs she often throws at him - and there is no doubt they make the best team at IACS.
Good Lines:
- When Case had to show his ID to police officers and the younger cop asked what IACS was, the older cop knew enough to state that IACS was "Nothing, and he is no one.... We never saw him".