Mason Wright is a student.
He is not a spy and does not want to be a spy and is definitely not happy when he is pushed into doing spy stuff, especially when he is shown it can get you very much dead.
Wright is a student, or at least he was until he stepped in to save a pal and got into a scuffle that ended badly and he walked away with the sort of notoriety that a school like Harvard would rather its students not produce and they told him to go away, at least for a few years. So, when we meet him initially, he has just flown into Charles de Gaulle Airport to begin a crash course in learning French well enough to get a decent job to ... well, do something since his original plans were no longer valid.
So, how does a down-on-his-luck student in a foreign country get involved in espionage and find that such work can kill you? Oddly enough, it seems through his friends! I am not sure I would like to have these kinds of friends and after a bit, neither is Wright. That is especially true when he gets wind of some things they are up to and so does MI6 and then MI6 get wind of him and ... after that, things get pretty dicey for Wright.
Wright is a born and raised Virginia boy who went to the University of Richmond before heading for an MBA at "a business school in Boston" (apparently a commonly used euphemism for Harvard). Business is what he wants to get into, not spying. As he learns the hard way, life does not usually go the way one plans.
Speaking of not planning things, the same could be said for Kelly O'Callaghan, a beautiful 25-year-old tech whiz who gets pulled into the same sort of danger that Wright does, solely because she was in charge of training new hires in the computer systems a company used. She also did not plan on the sort of things that will happen to them.