Alex Savage is a freelance agent.
The freelance part is most definitely accurate. He works for whomever can pay him his fee. The work is killing people. He is very good at it and being good, he gets a good number of offers which makes him a good chunk of change. He charges well for his services, too, starting price being, according to him in his first recorded adventure, £15,000, and going up "for every complication I spot".
He is quite particular about his assignments, though, because just as bad contract killers get caught because they are usually sloppy or inept or talk too much or so on, bad clients are just as dangerous because when pressed by the authorities, they generally break and give up who they hired. Savage is cautious in that regards. "I get away from every job I do. I wouldn't even start the job unless I knew I could get away. No point in having £24,000 from your latest job sitting in the bank if you're gonna spend the next 20 years waiting to spend it. So getting away is paramount."
So, we have determined that he is freelance, and good at it. The agent part is a bit trickier.
Long before we meet him, Savage had been in the SAS. He wants you to know he really was. As he jokes, every pub you enter has some fellow claiming to have been in the SAS, making it the "biggest British Army regiment in the world" if they all were to be believed. They aren't and it isn't and Savage is proud to have been one of the few who did in fact serve.
He had been in the "Paras" for four years before he made the selection to the SAS at age 21. "Spent three years in Northern Ireland in the early 1990s. Did a stint in the first Gulf War, my baptism of fire with the SAS. My specialty was as a sniper - an expert marksman, they called me, killing people half a mile away. Not that I'm afraid of close quarters combat. As you might've guessed, I don't mind shooting people in the face, I don't mind stabbing them in the chest, slitting their throats. But I'm not the world's largest person, so the further from my target I am, the better. If I have to kill somebody up close, it's better to have the element of surprise. When you're five foot five, you definitely need surprise. And a big bloody gun, of course."
But after a while he decided that he had tired of picking sand out of unpleasant areas of his body while in the Middle East so he said goodbye to Regiment. Still needed to make a living, though, and being on the dole was not something he wanted. [I did enjoy his recalling when he explained at the unemployment office, "I was a soldier. I can kill people".] Since killing was what he was really good at ...
So back to the 'agent' part. He is not officially part of an agency, not so anyone would admit. But his first hit as a civilian, and many more to come after, was for the government though they did not "pay me a lot, the tight bastards". But in between better paying hit gigs, Savage does still the odd job when Her Majesty's henchmen come to call. They still do not pay well, though.
Oh, one thing. Though Savage is somewhat height-challenged for a male adult, being only 5'5" tall, he does not like to be called a midget. Really does not like it. Really.