Lucas Hamilton is an agent with the CIA.
He will be. He pretty much is when we meet him just briefly in May of 1957 in a hospital where he is recuperating from a very bad time in the hands of the Stasi and in the ever so brief exchange between him and a psychiatrist sent to analyze him, we learn enough to know we want to learn more of this interesting young man.
I say young because when the narrative then shifts back a year, we meet Hamilton attending Rutgers University, a senior studying US-USSR relations and the Cold War. It was en route a lecture he was particularly interested in that he passes a poster which catches his eye inviting people to become a Student Ambassador. That is a program started by the Eisenhower Administration to get students to complete a semester of college abroad, living with a host family, in the hopes of earning a position with the State Department or other government agencies. Hamilton is working a full-time job while attending college so the idea of a full scholarship is notable.
It will also be the door through which Hamilton will step on his unplanned trek to having to survive the questioning of the East German secret police and his entry into the employment at Langley.
We learn that Hamilton is the son of a Hungarian woman named Alexandra Károlyi "who, along with ten-year-old Lukas, had survived the Nazis and escaped the communists, arriving in England as a French refugee under the assumed name of Alexandra Carol. There she met an American GI, Harold Hamilton, married him and returned with him to the United States, where she began her new life as an American citizen, and Lukas Károlyi became Lucas Hamilton". Hamilton's origins will play important roles in his activities in the Agency.
Hamilton is an expert in languages which will aid his career considerably; his skill with foreign tongues taught him by his mother growing up such that he was proficient in English, living in America, of course, as well as his former native Hungarian. She also taught him French and German and Russians; though she hated the Soviets, she loved that country's writers and passed that on to him as well. Those latter two languages, along with the Hungarian, will lay a foundation for his personal part in fighting the growing Cold War.