Dred James is an agent with an unnamed British Intelligence organization.
Actually, he is an assassin. That is his primary task on any mission his organization sends him on and he is very, very good at it. As we are told several times by different people inside the department, James is a legend. He has gone into places where there seemed no chance of coming out in any shape other than dead and James often just waltzes out, leaving his target(s) deceased. Unfortunately, being so good at killing plays havoc with his psyche.
When we first meet James he is near rock bottom; he was drinking himself to death, smoking too much along the way, almost looking forward to the end coming to put himself out of his misery. Then a chance comment by an old man in a bar telling James that dying was easy and that the hard part was living sobered him up enough to know he wanted a change. The next morning he woke up hung over and then realized as he asked himself what day it was, he also needed to ask what year it was. That is how out of it James was. Oh, the answer to the year question was 2003.
James was having this crisis while he was on vacation, as far as his Chief, the Director of the organization, was concerned. James is certain that he had actually resigned but the Chief just chuckles at such a notion. James's reason for wanting to quit is that he is tired of killing and since that is what his job requires, his only choice was to leave. Unfortunately for him, the time off allows him time to think about his life and his profession so he started drinking to forget and so on.
Returning to work, James will still have trouble with the frequent killing and will find other, some bizarre, ways of working out his issues but he remains a killer at heart, albeit a sometimes strange one.
Good Lines:
- Visiting the gadgets lab at HQ, James picks up a cellphone only to be warned not to touch it because it might explode, to which James comments, "Well, that's just sick."