The Storytellers by Robert Mercer-Nairne

women – and who is doing this to them.”
    â€œIs it true that the ports are being picketed?” Pete asked.
    â€œThat’s what I’ve heard,” Harvey told him.
    â€œThe unions are just not in control any more, and neither is the government,” concluded Pete. “It’s all with the shop stewards now.”
    â€œAnd a fair few of them are taking their orders from the KGB, I wouldn’t wonder,” growled their editor.
    â€œQuite possibly,” agreed Harvey. “Although it seems to me more like a highly contagious virus affecting everyone it touches with madness.”
    â€œAh, but it is only out of chaos that a new phoenix can arise,” opined George. “That madness may embody more method than any of us realize.”
    â€œI suppose I might be able to find something that has inconvenienced Her Majesty,” conceded Porter, torn between being left out and not wishing to dip his hands into such unseemly goings on.
    However the meeting was over and Porter’s indulgence fell on largely deaf ears. Harvey, for one, knew well enough what kind of phoenix his editor wanted to see rise from the ashes.

C HAPTER

    T HE MAN WHOSE WIFE imagined her husband was a well-paid analyst in a merchant bank became Peter Betsworth and slipped into Hyde Park. He’d had a call from ‘Marx’, one of his agents. Not the most original alias, but it appealed to him.
    * * *
    Marx enjoyed his trips to London. Partly this was because it meant he was earning his keep. He only visited the capital when he had something useful to give his handler. But mostly it was because he was given an overnight allowance for such trips and could meet up with Stacy in the Edgware Road boarding house where he stayed and she worked.
    There was also something about the city that liberated him. Factory life, even a factory life punctuated by union meetings at which plans to bring about a new order were discussed with surreal intensity, could become downright claustrophobic, especially as the brotherly love that bound them was shot through with hatred, insecurity and suspicion. No sooner had he stepped off the train atPaddington Station and melted into the crowd with its strangers of different shapes, sizes and nationalities, than the straitjacket of his other life fell away and he could wear a fresh skin.
    There were times when he felt like waving two fingers at it all. He and Stacy often fantasized about a new life. But even though he’d never met the lady, he sensed that when it came to it, his friend wouldn’t leave the mother she appeared to live with down in Barnes. He, on the other hand, had no ties. He supposed his own mother would miss him but he and his old man had long since ceased to talk, and his parents were close. He had avoided marriage like a poison. The prospect of being locked into a world he wanted to escape was not for him. Part of him admired his father’s dogged attachment to the union movement. There was a certain nobility to it, for sure. But the man’s blindness to the motives of the young firebrands who had hijacked the shop floor seemed pitifully romantic.
    The approach from the security services had been so bloody brazen: an advertisement in the Morning Star seeking recruits ‘to protect the nation’. ‘To protect the effing capitalist class’ more like, had been the dismissive reaction from the members of his cell. They’d even suggested he put himself forward as a double agent.
    He’d replied anonymously to the box number provided, suggesting a meeting two weeks hence in the Dog and Whistle, a boozer on the outskirts of Birmingham he knew none of his mates frequented. On the appointed day and time he had gone there with little expectation, wearing the leather jacket he had described, hopeful that his demonstration of what he imagined were the black arts of the trade he hoped to join would impress.
    There had been no other