Hannah Parras is an agent with Mossad.
Ivana Svilanovic is an agent with the CIA.
Naming this entry as I have it would be easy to think that these two operatives were partners, at least until you read the two sentences just above. These two are indeed from different agencies in different countries with obviously different motivations and objectives and when the recorded adventures begin, they have no knowledge of each other. But in the vein of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' they will meet and find they have similar immediate goals and working together is vital, if brief.
Parras is an Iranian Jew from an educated middle-class Tehrani family, sought by the Iranian secret police, the SVAMA. She is first met in 2006 as she is undercover in Tehran as a student who has made sure she attracted the attention of a high ranking Mullah who taught part time at the Women's University in that capital city. Expecting a night of pleasure with a young woman who would never have the nerve to make their liaison known, he was stunned to find her holding a small pistol on him; he was not kept in suspense long as he is fatally shot in the chest. That is when we learn that she was a plant by Mossad. She is described as being a beautiful woman with a radiant smile, "dark, almost black eyes and thick, curly hair [often] pulled back into a ponytail".
Svilanovic is first encountered a decade earlier, in 1995, when she is a captain in the U.S. Army, stationed in war-torn Bosnia as part of the U.N. peacekeepering UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protective Force. She speaks fluent Servian having been raised in a family with deep roots in the Balkans. She is described as "tall and lithe with almost translucent alabaster skin" and being a "cool one, a planner, with a sharp wit and a look that could turn instantly withering if she was crossed". She chose to enter the military after college and once her stint was done, took a position teaching in a college. After a relationship went south and she realized she was bored teaching, she shocked everyone by applying to and getting accepted by the CIA.
Parras and Svilanovic will find their respective work objectives bring them together for a time and the separate them again, only to repeat the process more than once.