The Vulpine Industrial Conglomerate has secured the rights to British rainfall. The Precipitation Privatisation Act includes a Splatter Indemnity Clause allowing citizens to be sued for unauthorised collection of water via damp clothing. The Treasury has not yet worked out the logistics of meter installation in the human trachea, but they are getting there.
Agent Black has been briefed.
Black is a greylag goose, an operative of the Service, barely a foot tall, and possessed of the weary lethality of a man who has seen empires crumble and breadcrumbs vanish. He carries a Mark IV Lithic Acoustic Decoupler - a weighted pebble that phase-cancels all outgoing vocal frequencies within six feet, rendering all verbalised intent as non-binding atmospheric vibration. He has opinions about penguin attire. He does not blink. He once unnerved a GRU defector into revealing a Siberian nerve gas facility through three minutes of sustained ocular discipline.
Agent Black: For God & Country is a deadpan espionage novella told across nine case files, from the Diogenes Club to the Snowdon Aviary. Black moves through the neo-Gothic estates of the landed gentry, the ventilation ducts of conspiratorial gatherings, the canals of north London at 3am, and the early morning mist of St James's Park, where M debrief on damp benches with lukewarm Earl Grey and careful language.
The satire is real - the privatisation of natural resources, the legislative capture of public goods, the fox-shaped logic of capital extracting rent from gravity - and it is delivered with the complete deadpan commitment of a narrative that never winks. The comedy lives in the premise. The execution is entirely serious.
A small, dark silhouette against the backdrop of an empire that doesn't know it's been saved. Nine cases. One operative. The weather stays free.
For readers who want their political satire delivered at suppressed-weapon velocity by a bird with no patience for invoiced thunderstorms.
