Leonard Markston and Thomas Lipkin are security consultants.
They are very good at it though to look at their offices and their homes, it would be hard to see it, especially Lipkin who lives in the garage apartment of his mother's home and is a whiz at starting improvement projects and never finishing them. The money they earn with their current occupation pays the bills but since Lipkin is a tech geek, a whole lot of their income goes to buying the very latest of anything the least bit high-tech. Luckily Lipkin is quite a bit better at understanding and using this gear than he is at handling drywall.
The two men do not normally go by the names listed above; they are Marks and Lip to each other and to most anyone who would not be considered an enemy.
If it were just for the sort of work they do on a regular basis when we first encounter them, they would not be part of this compendium. They are here because of the work that they once did and for the trouble that they will find looking for a friend and former colleague.
That former work had been for a little known government agency called the "Special Collection Service", or SCS, which Marks says "Name sounded like a branch of the US Postal Service. Bureaucratic and nondescript. Not unlike the buildings you'd find if you went to that address. Just three, low-rise boxy buildings. Could be any office park of any company. From the street all you'd see was a gate... It was a front name, completely bogus, didn't stand for anything." Behind that gate, though, you would find it a place "where they tried out their gadgets, their parabolic antennas, advanced listening equipment, bugs, and other eavesdropping equipment that were used out in the field. Most of it was miniaturized; meant for operators to insert in discrete places around the glob".
"The SCS did the dirty work that the NSA needed to have done. Their unit did some of the more "challenging assignments" that the NSA faced." To accomplish much of what their mission was, they needed boots on the ground, "Men and women with covert operative training".
Marks and Lip roomed together in college. Lip went to the Shadow Factory, as they call NSA, while Marks joined the Marines and then into Force Recon. After a time, SCS recruited both of them and they were with that organization for a good number of years before going out on their own.
Both Marks and Lip are in their mid-40s, both single (though Marks is divorced). And while they are partners in their business and best of friends, the two are wildly different. Lip is overweight and very much a slob while still having made 7th degree black belt in a martial art; he is a genius when it comes to anything electrical or computer related. Marks is as squared away as any Marine ever was and has kept himself in terrific physical shape, all the while being practically a Luddite despite having a photographic memory.
Together they make a pretty cool team. As we are told at one point, "
If you need info, Lip was your man. Need to blow something up, call Marks."