Restless by William Boyd

modifications he required. The radio tower was heightened and made more powerful. The original staff, some dozen Belgian journalists, were retained but quartered on the second floor, where they continued to sift and disseminate the local news from this small corner of northern Europe – livestock sales, village fetes, bicycle races, high and low tides, closing prices from the Brussels bourse and so on – duly passing their copy down to the telegraphists on the ground floor, who transformed the information into Morse code and telegraphed it to the agency's 137 subscribers.
    Romer's unit occupied the third floor. A small team of five who spent their days reading every European and relevant foreign newspaper they could find, and who, after due process of consultation and discussion, would insert, from time to time, a particular Romer-story into the mass of trivia beamed out from the innocuous building on the rue d'Yser.
    Apart from Romer and Eva the other four members of Romer's 'team' were Morris Devereux – Romer's number two – an elegant and suave ex-Cambridge don; Angus Woolf, a former Fleet Street journalist who was severely crippled by some congenital deformation of his spine; Sylvia Rhys-Meyer – Eva's flatmate – a lively woman in her late thirties, married and divorced three times and an ex-Foreign Office linguist and translator; and Alfie Blytheswood – who had nothing to do with the material that came out of the agency but was responsible for the maintenance and smooth running of the powerful transmitters and the occasional wireless encryptions. This was AAS in its entirety, Eva came to realise, very quickly: Romer's team was small and tight-knit – apart from her everyone seemed to have been working for him for several years, Morris Devereux even longer.
    Eva hung her coat and hat on her usual hook and made for her desk. Sylvia was still there, flicking through yesterday's Swedish newspapers. The ashtray in front of her was brimful of cigarette butts.
    'Busy night?'
    Sylvia arched her back and eased her shoulders to simulate fatigue. She looked like a stout, no-nonsense county wife, the wife of the local GP or a gentleman farmer, bosomy and broad-hipped, who wore well-cut suits and expensive accessories – except that everything else about Sylvia Rhys-Meyer contradicted that initial assessment.
    'Fucking boring, fucking dull boring, boring dull fucking, dull fucking boring,' she said, standing up to allow Eva to take her seat.
    'Oh, yes,' Sylvia added. 'Your dead-sailors piece has been picked up all over the place.' She opened and pointed to a page in the Svenska Dagbladet. 'And it's in The Times and in Le Monde. Congratulations. His nibs will be very pleased.'
    Eva looked at the Swedish text, recognising certain words. It was a story she had suggested at conference a few days before: the idea of twenty Icelandic sailors washed up in a remote Norwegian fjord, alleging that their fishing boat had sailed into heavily mined waters off the port of Narvik. Eva knew at once that it was the sort of story Romer loved. It had already provoked an official denial by the British War Office (Norwegian territorial waters had not been mined by British ships) – more to the point, as Romer would say, it was loose intelligence: a fishing boat sunk by a mine – where? – and it was information useful to the enemy. Any further denials would be either disbelieved or be too late – the news was out there in the world doing its dirty work. German intelligence officials monitoring the world's media would note the alleged presence of mines off the Norwegian coast. This would be conveyed to the navy; maps would be taken out, amended, altered. It was, in essence, the ideal illustration of how Romer's unit and A.I. Nadal was meant to work. Information wasn't neutral, Romer constantly repeated: if it was believed or even half believed, then everything began subtly to change as a result – the ripple effect could have consequences