Melody Beecham is an agent with Unit One.
That is an ultra-secret government clandestine organization designed to take the fight to the enemy without any of the public learning anything ever happened.
Becoming an operative at age 28, she had already had a full and interesting life. The daughter of an English Lady whose father was an Earl and of an American self-made millionaire, she possessed considerable beauty and a flair about her that made her a well-sought after model from her teen years on. Following nearly a decade of being in demand and well paid for it, she quit to enjoy her first love, art. As the series opens, she was putting the finishing touches on an art gallery in New York.
The death of her mother under suspicious circumstances and the subsequent discovery that her father was not really her biological parent dealt her two swift blows but a third came when the man she had always thought her father turned on her so swiftly, changing from a caring, albeit distant parent to being a cold-hearted man bent of revenge.
Then came the approach by Unit One for her assistance. The agency first tried to blackmail her into helping them but they found that didn't work as nobody forces Beecham to do anything. Besides, when one is constantly in the public eye, there is little chance for privacy. Finding out something that the paparazzi and tabloids had not already found proved fruitless. To finally get her to join, they had to use an unusual weapon - the truth of what her former father was up to that might have cost her mother's life. Now they had her interest and soon her cooperation.
Once that assignment was done, Beecham was in.