Kate Henderson is an agent with MI6.
She has been an operative with the Secret Intelligence Service for quite a few years already by the time we meet her in the first recorded adventure. She has worked her way up the chain of command to where she is enjoying a good amount of autonomy in her handling of those she recruited to spy for them against her main opponent, Russia.
She is also a human being with a life outside work and she has the difficult task of trying very hard, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing terribly, to juggle both family and career. Considering the trials that both throw at her constantly, it is amazing she has not yet broken.
On the professional side of her life, she will be dealing with the incredible possibility that maybe, perhaps, the man who is inching quickly to becoming the next Prime Minister of England could be a sleeper put into place years before by the Russians and groomed ever so carefully to reach that top position. The proof is there but like often the case, it can be interpreted differently and to make such an accusation out loud could end her life as she knows it, regardless of whether her claim is true or not.
On the personal side of her life, she is happily married to Stuart but he is increasingly becoming distant and she has to wonder if it is because of her spending too much time at work or something more involved. She has two teenage children who are dealing with their own issues as all teens much do. Fiona is a 15-year-old girl who is ready to be treated as a woman and is dealing with being in love with a boy who wants things she is not yet ready to give and with parents, especially a dad, who are not ready for their little girl to grow up. Gus is a couple years younger and dealing with peer pressure and the lure of life in front of a video game machine to the exclusion of other things. And Henderson has a mother who is showing the signs of Alzheimer's.
Henderson's troubles, both at work and at home, will not get any better as time goes by.
Good Lines:
- When Kate asks if her husband might be getting too old for playing a sport he loves, he replies, "It would be fine if all the other bastards weren't so young."