Free Restless by William Boyd

embarrassing acronym, I know, but it stands for Actuarial and Accountancy Services.'
    'Very boring.'
    'Exactly.'
    And she thought, suddenly, that she did like Romer – liked his brand of cleverness, his way of second-guessing everything. He ordered a brandy for himself. Eva wanted nothing more.
    'I'll give you another piece of advice,' he said. 'In fact I'll always be giving you advice – tips – from time to time. You should try to remember them.'
    She suddenly disliked him again: the self-satisfaction, the amour propre, were sometimes just too much. I am the cleverest man in the world and all I have to deal with are you poor fools.
    'Find yourself a safe house. Somewhere. Wherever you happen to be for any length of time, have a safe house, a personal one. Don't tell me, don't tell anyone. Just a place you can be sure of going to, where you can be anonymous, where you can hide, if need be.'
    'Romer's rules,' she said. 'Any more?'
    'Oh, there are plenty more,' he said, not picking up the irony in her voice, 'but as we're on the subject, I'll tell you the most important rule. Rule number one, never to be forgotten.'
    'Which is?'
    'Don't trust anyone,' he said, without any portentousness, but with a kind of mundane confidence and certainty, as if he had said 'Today is Friday'. 'Don't trust anyone, ever,' he repeated and took out a cigarette and lit it, thinking, as if he'd managed to surprise himself by his acuity. 'Maybe it's the only rule you need. Maybe all the other rules I'll tell you are just versions of this rule. "The one and only rule". Don't trust anyone – not even the one person you think you can trust most in this world. Always suspect. Always mistrust.' He smiled, not his warm smile. 'It'll stand you in excellent stead.'
    'Yes, I'm learning that.'
    He drank the rest of his brandy down in a one-er. He drank quite a lot, she'd noticed, in her few encounters with Romer.
    'We'd better get you back to Lyne,' he said, calling for the bill.
    At the door they shook hands. Eva said she could catch a bus home easily enough. She thought he was looking at her more intently than usual and she remembered that she had her hair down – he's probably never seen me with my hair down, she thought.
    'Yes… Eva Delectorskaya,' he said, musingly, as if he had other things on his mind. 'Who would've thought?' He reached out as if to pat her shoulder and then decided against it. 'Everyone's very pleased. Very.' He looked up at the afternoon sky with its great building clouds, grey, laden, threatening. 'War next month,' he said, in the same bland tone, 'or the next. The big European war.' He looked back and smiled at her. 'We shall do our bit,' he said, 'don't worry.'
    'In the Actuarial and Accountancy Services.'
    'Yes… Ever been to Belgium?' he asked suddenly.
    'Yes. I went to Brussels once. Why?'
    'I think you might like it. Bye, Eva.' He gave her a half salute, half wave and sauntered away. Eva could hear him whistling. She turned and walked thoughtfully to the bus station.
    Later, as she sat in the waiting-room, waiting for the bus to Galashiels, she found herself looking at the other occupants of the small room also waiting for their buses – the men and women, and the few children. She was examining them, evaluating them, assessing them, placing them. And she thought: if only you knew, if only you knew who I was and what I did. Then she caught herself, almost exclaiming with surprise. She realised suddenly that everything had indeed changed, that she was now looking at the world in a different way. It was as if the nervous circuits in her brain had altered, as if she'd been rewired, and she knew that her lunch with Romer had marked both the end of something old and the beginning of something new. She understood now, with almost distressing clarity, that for the spy the world and its people were different than they were for everybody else. With a small tremor of alarm and, she had to admit, with a small tremor of excitement,