Character Development: Who Is FBI Agent J.J. McCall?

[S.D. Skye]

I always draw on my life and career experiences when developing new characters
for my novels. FBI Agent J.J. McCall is no different. She's actually very
loosely based on an FBI Agent I worked with during my 12 year tenure at the
Bureau. Of all the agents I worked with, and I worked with quite a few, she
always stood out in my mind for many reasons.

One reason she clings to my
memory is that she was, at least at the time, the only African-American female
agent assigned to catch Russian spies. The only one I'd ever seen. She was maybe
5'2 or 5'3--completely unimposing. She was like a doll who you wanted to sit
next to a fluffed pillow and comb her hair--but wearing a really sharp pantsuit.
And she looked like she was about 12 years old. Okay, not 12, but not much
older. Certainly as young as I was at the time and I was in my late 20s. I would
see her walking in and out of the Russian operational units and wondered why she
was there. She seemed completely out of place.Understand, Russian
counterintelligence at the FBI has generally been dominated by white men and a
few white women. African-Americans usually served in clerical support
positions.That's just a statement of fact. So, to see this petite 12 year old
African American female FBI agent wandering around the halls of the Hoover
Building was in and of itself an anomaly. Imagine my shock and surprise when I
found out that not only was she an agent, she was a SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT
assigned to work ESPIONAGE cases.

What?

Had I been dropped into
some alternate universe? From that point on, I wondered what must she have
endured to get into that position. How many jerks (and the FBI had more than its
share) did she have to endure? How many slots had she been passed up on before
she got this one? How many snide remarks did people squawk behind her back? How
many people told her  (or at least thought) she'd have problems recruiting
sources because of the color of her skin? How did she persevere to get into a position coveted by so many white male FBI
agents?

Then it one day I found out. As an analyst, I had been assigned
to work on a joint intelligence community task force which was formed to find
the source of some intelligence compromises. And the agent assigned to the case
was the 12 year old. Only she wasn't. I remember, we stepped into the State
Department lobby for the meeting and she tried to whisper her birth date--which
was in the 1950s!

I caught myself saying out loud, "Are you f*cking
kidding me!!"

Trust me, if I looked her age and had a birth date in the
1950s I would print it on a T-shirt and proudly prance around with it on every
moment I could. As it turned out, not only was she a lot older than I thought
but she was also one of the sharpest agents I'd ever met--man or woman, black,
white, or otherwise. She walked into the meeting and commanded it. Not in a
"step out of my way I'm FBI" kind of way, but in a "this issue is too important
to dilly dally with, let's get to business" kind of way. And she had an innate
ability to drill through the sea of BS floating about the room to get to the
point.

Somewhere, in the far recesses of my mind, I told myself that I
would write a story about women like her someday. Even though I'm not sure I
could conceive that I would be a published author just a few years after leaving
the Bureau or writing a series for publication, she sowed a seed in me.

 

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