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make out in the semi-darkness, but some faint light was coming in from under the door, enough to allow them to see what their surroundings were like. Not that there was much to see: bare walls, a couple of old mattresses on the floor, and the door. There was also a palpable dampness to the air which was consistent with them being in an underground basement.
    Their hands were zip-locked behind their backs.
    “Damn it,” Reilly hissed. “How could we let this happen?”
    “I didn’t even see him make that call,” Malone said. “Did you?”
    “No.”
    Malone shook his head. “It’s very out of character for us both. We should have known he’d call for back-up.”
    The room fell silent with frustration.
    “We need to get out of here,” Malone finally said.
    “Yeah, but how?”
    Malone looked around the room. “There’s always a way, right?”
    “Always.” Reilly was walking around the perimeter of the room, scrutinizing the walls. He did a second lap, then he stopped and tilted his head slightly, deep in thought. “I can’t see it yet.”
    “There’s a way out, I can sense it,” Malone insisted. “It’s like … it’s at the tip of my consciousness. But I can’t put my finger on it.”
    “Me too. It’s just … weird. It’s like I can’t fully engage my thinking on this.”
    “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