Before they were the best private security operatives in the business, Robert Chandler and Alexandra Wells were Uncle Sam's best. Travel back in time to the year 1995 as the two young CIA agents put it all on the line for the good ole US of A, fighting to stay alive while outclassing the bad guys at every turn, and still managing to find time for love along the way.
Excerpt:
Robert Chandler joined the CIA right out of college, having grown up like every other kid watching spy movies and thinking what a great job that had to be. Quickly, once he entered on duty, the myth of intelligence work had been dispelled to be replaced with brutal reality. There was no James Bond, you didn't get to sleep with beautiful femme fatales every other day, and in actual gun battles, the good guys didn't always prevail, if you could figure out just who the good guys really were. None of this surprised or disappointed young Robert in the least..
He was black and not British so he wasn't looking for James Bond. And while there was nothing intrinsically wrong with bedding a string of beautiful women, he was already taken with one, the one, and had no desire in that respect beyond her. And as for gun battles, thankfully there weren't too many of them, and thus far, the ones he had been involved in had gone his way.
Robert, like a lot of people, had been seeking to become a field operations officer, or case officer, what people really mean when they think spy. These folks are the operators in the field responsible for offensive intelligence gathering in denied or hostile areas. It was difficult and demanding work, and a number of officers over the years had died doing it, the only recognition they received for their deeds was an anonymous star on the wall of honor at Agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia, if they were lucky; so to speak. But Robert didn't qualify for that career field, much to his initial disappointment; how-ever, this did not last long, once he was selected for something else. A career he wasn't planning on, but one for which he had been designated perfect.
The Office of Security at CIA is one of the largest and most covert operating units within the Agency. Their responsibilities ex-tend everywhere the Agency has operations, which is everywhere in the world. And unlike most CIA entities, they are authorized (on a limited basis) to operate domestically. Their mission is to protect the security of the Agency, all of its information, its facilities, and most importantly, its personnel. It was to that latter requirement that Robert was deemed well suited to undertake, and therefore he was sent into special agents' training at OS' Academy in Central Virginia, spending six months being honed into a highly skilled security opera-tor. Weapons--firearm and bladed--, multiple forms of unarmed combat, close-protection, surveillance and counter surveillance, offensive and defensive driving, counterterrorism tactics, and a lot more.
It surprised none of his instructors that Robert graduated at the top of his class, being deployed almost immediately on an overseas posting. In less than a month, he distinguished himself by single-handedly preventing an assassination attempt of a visiting Agency executive (the man who now headed the Operations Directorate--the Deputy Director for Operations--then Chief of the Near East Divi-sion). From that point, his star was on the rise in OS, with many eyes from all over the Agency on him.