Alison Carter is an assassin for the CIA.
As professions go, the job of assassin is largely a thankless one. To do your job you need to get in and get out without being noticed. Most of the assassins about whom series are written practice their craft constantly, having no other source of income to distract them. Not so the hero of this two-book series.
Alison Carter (also spelt Allison on occasion) has a real day job and it is one that gives him the ability to go places where his other job dictates. When he is not killing people on behalf of the CIA, Carter is the Medical Director for the Department of State. He is responsible for the health of all the people in thirty-three different governmental agencies with people stationed overseas in embassies, consulates, and such. Interestingly, the only agency he does NOT have connection with is the CIA. This position gives him extraordinary opportunities to travel wherever he is needed whether it is to cure or kill.
In his other role, he answers to a General Atherton who operates out of a basement in the Pentagon from where he is chief executive officer for a small cadre of contract killers referred to as the 'virtual assassination squad'. These various men and women all had normal jobs that paid well and were fulfilling but they took their extracuricular assignments for additional money or for patriotic reason. For Carter, it is to help cleanse the world of disease, one violent monster at a time. For his services Carter is usually paid a flat $10 million dollars but of that he keeps only $100,000 for expenses and the rest are apportioned out among thirty different charities, showing clearly that Carter isn't in it for the money. As he considers it, "by disposition and training he was a physician. By avocation he was a contract assassin."
Carter's attitude towards his killing is rather down-to-earth. Just as a surgeon would not think twice about cutting off a part of a patient if the patient needed it done to live, so Carter believes that taking out an evil individual here or there can easily mean that hundreds or thousands of people might now live who would otherwise have died. Throughout his assignments, he maintains an interesting interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath.