off their hooks, lying on the rosewood desktop. He picked one of them up.
"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