Lydia Twomey is an agent with MI5.
She has been with that intelligence organization, and more specifically inside its Internal Security department, since she graduated from university in Birmingham around eight years before we first meet her. She is now just shy of 30 years of age and, according to her immediate supervisor, she has "proved yourself to be very bright and combative". That last description is interesting and something she wants to take exception with but we get a good idea about its accuracy when he adds ""you've shown signs of needing new challenges lately" and she gets visibly annoyed when she is not told what signs he meant.
Twomey wants very much to continue to be a officer with MI5 but she freely admits that she is "no fan of the public school and Oxbridge-educated male elite who run the agency". She also believes that she is being for some reason "punished by stultifying boredom" with her current task of scrolling through the social media accounts of the most recent batch of graduate recruits to MI5. Then "something even more mind-numbing" is assigned her and she knows for a fact that she is out of favor. Both helping her and proving to be an annoyance to her superiors is that she "possessed an outsize bulls**t detector".
Twomey is described as 5'6" with "big blue eyes, severely cut short dark hair". She has no steady boyfriend since her last one was offered a job in New York at the UN. She enjoys reading and getting about the city (and anywhere else she needs to go) on her Kawasaki 250, a motocross motorcycle.
Good Lines:
- Thoughts of a victim, "A final devastating moment of clarity: I'm going to die, he thought. He was correct."