“Same here. It’s like something’s missing. Like I can’t focus.”
They stared at each other in the semi-darkness. “What do we do?”
“Keep thinking,” Reilly said. “And hope our usual inspiration kicks in soon.”
In a similar bare but illuminated room, Khoury was also pacing around.
“Tough pitch meeting, huh? And where the hell is the food he promised us?” the author grumbled. “I’m starving.”
“‘Other guests,’” Berry said, his focus still on their captor’s parting words. “What do you think he meant by that?”
“Other writers?” Khoury wondered.
“Maybe. Which would be good. The more of us go missing, the more someone’s going to notice.”
“But it makes you and me disposable if we don’t deliver.” Khoury. “We need to come up with the winning plot if we want to stay alive.”
“Who do you think they’ve grabbed?”
“Who’s in town besides Lee and Rollins?”
“Simon Toyne. Sandra Brown. Lisa Gardner. Peter James.”
Khoury frowned. “Crap. That’s some tough competition. We’re going to need to get our thinking caps on big time.”
Berry said, “Maybe we’re not approaching this the right way. What would Malone and Reilly do?”
“What do you mean?”
“We always write them into this kind of trouble. But when we do, we always write in something tiny, a crack in the set-up that gives them a way out.”
“But we didn’t write this. This is real life.”
“True, but maybe there’s a crack here too. Or maybe there’s something we’ve used in one of our books that we could use here.”
Khoury grinded it over for a moment. “Do you have any pills on you? Anything that can make one of us so sick that they need to get us to a hospital?”
“Rasputin’s Shadow,” Berry said.
Khoury smiled and aimed a congratulatory finger his way. “Well done, sir. Well done. I love a focused reader.”
Berry grimaced with disappointment. “Sadly, I don’t have any vials of psychotropic powder on me right now.”
Khoury scanned the room again. Then his eyes settled on the mattress Abul Mowt had shot up. Bits of spring and cotton were sticking out of it, and the image triggered something inside him. He stared at it, deep in thought, then a small grin broke across his face.
“I used something in an old screenplay of mine,” he told Berry. “My character needed to sneak into a high-security facility. He had gone to the house of a sleazebag who worked there and knocked him out, so he had the guy and the guy’s Porsche to use, but the place had fingerprint checks as well as overhead thermal scanners that checked the cars at the entrance gate.”
“So how’d he get in?”
“I’ll show you.”
11
Berry heard the keys working the lock seconds before the door to the authors’ cell swung open. He was ready, sitting patiently on his mattress with his back against the wall.
The door creaked open, and the two now-familiar goons stepped in. One — the driver — stayed by the door. The other had a full carrier bag in his hand.
“Your food,” the man with the bag announced — then he stopped in his tracks.
His eyes, wide with alarm, scoured the large, empty space.
“Where’s your friend?”
Berry sounded surprised. “Friend?”
The goon was quickly losing it. The bag just tumbled out of his hand and he reached for his gun. “Your friend. The other writer.”
Berry looked around the room with mock bewilderment. It was, in fact, empty. Apart from Berry and the two goons, there was no one else in the room.
“I don’t know,” Berry said in a surprised, concerned tone. “He’s not with you?”
“No, he’s not with us. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, he was gone. I assumed you took him to use the toilet or something. Speaking of which—”
“No,” the man screamed. “Where is he? Where is he?” He was now leaping around in a mad panic, waving his gun around like a lunatic.
“I’m telling you I don’t know,” Berry said, then his worried tone turned conspiratorial. “Man, are you boys going to get in trouble?”
The man looked at him in utter bewilderment, then turned to the other goon and started rambling something in Arabic. The driver had now also stepped into the room and was walking around its perimeter, scrutinizing the walls as if anyone could just melt into them.
Berry couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it sounded like they were having a heated debate about what to do. You didn’t need to be the Amazing Kreskin to guess what was going on: they were crapping themselves about what the head goon was going to do to them when he found out one of his prized authors had somehow escaped — and, more critically, which one of them was going to be the one to tell him about it.
The hissing match kept going until a fierce tirade from the gunman finally pummeled his cohort into submission. With drooped shoulders and a fatalistic shrug, the driver muttered something as he shuffled off into the darkness beyond, leaving the first goon alone with Berry.
“Where is he? How did he get out of here?” the man asked, his face sweating in an intense fear and bewilderment combo.
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Berry said with forced sincerity and compassion as he pushed himself up to his feet and took a few steps away from the mattress.
The goon kept his eyes locked on him, his gaze and his gun tracking Berry as the author skirted the long side of the room, ambling slowly towards the opposite wall, where the other mattress lay.
“I mean, it’s not humanly possible, is it? For a fully-formed adult male to just vanish like that. Is it? Unless,” Berry added as he stopped, turned and raised a questioning finger with dramatic flourish, “unless he managed to go through the wall.”
“‘Through the wall’? What are you talking about?”
“What, you don’t know? No, of course you don’t. Not many people do.” His expression went all professorial. “It’s called quantum tunneling. I only know that because Raymond told me he was researching it for his next book.”
The man had rotated to keep facing Berry, his face a pained mix of confusion and worry.
“See, there was this fellow in Paris by the name of Dutilleul who worked as a clerk in the Registration Ministry. This man had the ability to walk through walls,” Berry informed his captor, “like at platform nine and three quarters at Kings Cross in the Harry Potter books — but you probably haven’t read them, have you?”
The goon gave him a sheepish shrug. “Actually, I saw the movies.”
“Pirated downloads?”
The man’s eyes dropped guiltily to the ground.
“Of course, what else.” Berry raised a chastising finger. “Anyway, I’d love to tell you more about it, but now’s not really the place or time for it.”
He added and emphasis on the word “time,” and, as he did, looked over the goon’s shoulder.
But nothing happened.
The man seemed confused. “You really think it’s possible?”
“I do, but like I said, now is not the right time.” Again, he raised his voice when saying the word “time,” and again, he looked over the goon’s shoulder.
A sudden, loud rustle coming from behind him surprised the goon. He turned and saw the mattress Berry had been sitting on rise up off the ground, on its side, along with a loud shriek. The man raised his gun in fear — but before he could fire, Berry, who was now behind him, unleashed a vicious side kick, buckling the man’s knee.
The man yelped as his leg collapsed, and he went down, lopsided, the gun falling from his grasp as he hit the ground.