Lee Child - Tripwire

“Hello?” he said into it. “This is Chester Stone.”

He repeated it twice into the electronic silence. Then a woman came on and asked him to hold. There were clicks and buzzes. A moment of soothing music.

“Mr. Stone?” a new voice said. “This is the Insolvency Unit.”

Stone closed his eyes and gripped the phone.

“Please hold for the director,” the voice said.

There was more music. Fierce baroque violins, scraping away, relentlessly.

“Mr. Stone?” a deep voice said. “This is the director.”

“Hello,” Stone said. It was all he could think of to say.

“We’re taking steps,” the voice said. “I’m sure you understand our position.”

“OK,” Stone said. He was thinking what steps? Lawsuits? Prison?

“We should be out of the woods, start of business tomorrow,” the voice said.

“Out of the woods? How?”

“We’re selling the debt, obviously.”

“Selling it?” Stone repeated. “I don’t understand.”

“We don’t want it anymore,” the voice said. “I’m sure you can understand that. It’s moved itself way outside of the parameters that we feel happy with. So we’re selling it. That’s what people do, right? They got something they don’t want anymore, they sell it, best price they can get.”

“Who are you selling it to?” Stone asked, dazed.

“A trust company in the Caymans. They made an offer.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Us?” the voice repeated, puzzled. “It leaves us nowhere. Your obligation to us is terminated. There is no us. Our relationship is over. My only advice is that you never try to resurrect it. We would tend to regard that as insult added to injury.”

“So who do I owe now?”

“The trust company in the Caymans,” the voice said patiently. “I’m sure whoever’s behind it will be contacting you very soon, with their repayment proposals.”

JODIE DROVE. REACHER got out and walked around the hood and got back in on the passenger side. She slid over the center console and buzzed the seat forward. Cruised south through the sunny Croton reservoirs, down toward the city of White Plains. Reacher was twisting around, scanning behind them. No pursuers. Nothing suspicious. Just a perfect lazy June afternoon in the suburbs. He had to touch the blister through his shirt to remind himself that anything had happened at all.

She headed for a big mall. It was a serious building the size of a stadium, crowding proudly against office towers its own height, standing inside a knot of busy roads. She drifted left and right across the traffic lanes and followed a curved ramp underground to the parking garage. It was dark down there, dusty oil-stained concrete, but there was a brass-and-glass doorway in the distance, leading directly into a store and blazing with white light like a promise. Jodie found a slot fifty yards from it. She eased in and went away to do something with a machine. Came back and laid a small ticket on the dash, where it could be read through the windshield.

“OK,” she said. “Where to first?”

Reacher shrugged. This was not his area of expertise. He had bought plenty of clothes in the last two years, because he had developed a habit of buying new stuff instead of washing the old stuff. It was a defensive habit. It defended him against carrying any kind of a big valise, and it defended him against having to learn the exact techniques of laundering. He knew about laundromats and dry cleaners, but he was vaguely worried about being alone in a laundromat and finding himself unsure of the correct procedures. And giving stuff to a dry cleaner implied a commitment to be back in the same physical location at some future time, which was a commitment he was reluctant to make. The most straightforward practice was to buy new and junk the old. So he had bought clothes, but exactly where he had bought them was hard for him to pin down. Generally he just saw clothes in a store window, went in and bought them, and came out again without really being sure of the identity of the establishment he had visited.

“There was a place I went in Chicago,” he said. “I think it was a chain store, short little name. Hole? Gap? Something like that. They had the right sizes.”

Jodie laughed. Linked her arm through his.

“The Gap,” she said. “There’s one right in here.”

The brass-and-glass doorway led straight into a department store. The air was cold and stank of soap and perfume. They passed through the cosmetics into an area with tables piled high with summer clothes in pastel cottons. Then out into the main thoroughfare of the mall. It was oval like a racetrack, ringed with small stores, the whole arrangement repeated on two more levels above them. The walks were carpeted and music was playing and people were swarming everywhere.

“I think the Gap’s upstairs,” Jodie said.

Reacher smelled coffee. One of the units opposite was done out as a coffee bar, like a street place in Italy. The inside walls were painted like outside walls, and the ceiling was flat black, so it would disappear like the sky. An inside place looking like an outside place, in an inside mall that was trying to look like an outside shopping street, except it had carpets.

“You want to get coffee?” he asked.

Jodie smiled and shook her head. “First we shop, then we get coffee.”

She led him toward an escalator. He smiled. He knew how she was feeling. He had felt the same, fifteen years before. She had come with him, nervous and tentative, on a routine visit to the glass house in Manila. Familiar territory to him, just routine, really nothing at all. But new and strange to her. He had felt busy and happy, and somehow educational. It had been fun being with her, showing her around. Now she was feeling the same thing. All this mall stuff was nothing to her. She had come home to America a long time ago and learned its details. Now he was the stranger in her territory.

“What about this place?” she called to him.

It wasn’t the Gap. It was some one-off store, heavily designed with weathered shingles and timbers rescued from some old barn. The clothes were made from heavy cottons and dyed in subdued colors, and they were artfully displayed in the beds of old farm carts with iron-banded wheels.

He shrugged. “Looks OK to me.”

She took his hand. Her palm felt cool and slim against his. She led him inside and put her hair behind her ears and bent and started looking through the displays. She did it the way he’d seen other women do it. She used little flicks of her wrist to put together assemblages of different items. A pair of pants, still folded, laid over the bottom half of a shirt. A jacket laid sideways over both of them, with the shirt peeping out at the top, and the pants showing at the bottom. Half-closed eyes, pursed lips. A shake of the head. A different shirt. A nod. Real shopping.

“What do you think?” she asked.

She had put together a pair of pants, khaki, but a little darker than most chinos. A shirt in a quiet check, greens and browns. A thin jacket in dark brown which seemed to match the rest pretty well. He nodded.

“Looks OK to me,” he said again.

The prices were handwritten on small tickets attached to the garments with string. He flicked one over with his fingernail.

“Christ,” he said. “Forget about it.”

“It’s worth it,” she said. “Quality’s good.”

“I can’t afford it, Jodie.”

The shirt on its own was twice what he had ever paid for a whole outfit. To dress in that stuff was going to cost him what he had earned in a day, digging pools. Ten hours, four tons of sand and rock and earth.

“I’ll buy them for you.”

He stood there with the shirt in his hands, uncertain.