The Secret Agent: It is 1886, and Verloc, an agent provocateur who is secretly working for the police and the Russian Embassy while ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho, is required by his masters to betray the anarchists in some spectacular way. The plan goes horribly wrong and the repercussions are dramatically different from those intended by Verloc. Nostromo: The attempt to rescue the silver of the San Tome mine from the hands of yet another revolutionary dictator tests the characters of the Goulds, inheritors of the Latin American mine, and of the indispensable and trustworthy Nostromo himself. In the swirling world of Costaguana, as in the London of The Secret Agent, the psychology of individuals in the most extreme cirumstances reflects the fears and hopes of the time.