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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