Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Shivers, The Manchurian Candidate: all drew their horror from the alarming thought that other humans might have been subsumed by some nefarious agent.
In Spook Country (2007), characters navigate a world filled with spies, ghosts, and other nefarious unseen agents.
Since Tunisian revolutionaries this year anointed their successful revolt against the country's dictatorial president the "Jasmine Revolution," this flowering cousin of the olive tree has been branded a nefarious change-agent by the skittish men who keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.
Senior officials have portrayed the organizers as nefarious profiteers controlled by foreign agents who want this region to secede from Russia.
They are at the center of fans' conspiracy theories about sports, the supposed agents of the nefarious (or merely corporatist) desires of the leagues that employ them.
Several episodes of the latest series, which finished on Sunday night, have featured Chinese agents engaged in nefarious activities: trying to kidnap a scientist and threatening to detonate a bomb in London if anyone interfered; working with Russians to hack Anglo-US cybersecurity; and stealing the blueprint of a genetic weapon.
Marvel faced a similar backlash earlier this year when Captain America was unexpectedly revealed to be a sleeper agent for the nefarious Hydra organisation in a shocking final-page twist.
They said his story was a cautionary tale, one of an ambitious businessman whom federal agents lured into the nefarious underworld of money laundering.
After having seemingly exhausted the nefarious uses of insects as unwitting agents in human conflict, the United States managed to find a new way — 100,000 or so years after humans first inflicted pain on one another with bees and wasps — to exploit the natural world as a means of creating suffering.
In the course of the evening, Bob discloses that he's a secret agent attempting to thwart a nefarious plot, by the so-called Black Badger, to steal and sell the complete list of U.S. undercover agents, and he needs Calvin's forensic-accounting skills to help make sense of a spreadsheet filled with data.
