Andretti paid him no mind. He had stopped on the sidewalk, breathing in the cold air and watching the rather fetching rear end of a young woman in a short, tight skirt as she entered the building ahead of him. He didn’t notice the second limo that pulled to an abrupt stop at the curb behind him. Nor did he see the two men who hopped out and stepped up on either side of him as he followed the tight skirt up the short flight of steps to the revolving door.

He was about to try to cram himself into the same compartment of the revolving door with the woman. That’s when two sets of hands, one on either shoulder, grabbed him and jerked him backward.

“Hey, wait a minute! What the hell…?”

A voice from behind his left ear growled in a heavy Eastern European accent, “Mr. Andretti, you vill shut up and come quietly with us or I am afraid you vill be quite dead.”

Something hard was poking him low in the ribs. The fat CTO shivered with fear. This couldn’t be happening to him. No one would dare threaten Carl Andretti. He was connected. This pair didn’t seem to care.

A nearly identical voice on his other side growled, low and deep, “Into the car. Ve are going for a ride, you and us, Mr. Andretti. Ve vant to talk.”

The strong hands pushed him down into the backseat of the waiting limo and onto the floorboard. The pair jumped in on either side and shoved his head downward to the floor as the car cruised away. Andretti heard no cry of alarm from anyone on the sidewalk. Either they were all too busy to notice he was being kidnapped or too busy to care.

Andretti struggled, tried to get up, to get a glimpse of the two men who would doubtless soon kill him. “Godammit! Let me up. You sons of bitches are in a world of hurt. You don’t know who you’re messin’ with. I have friends who—”

As the limo swung off Mall Drive onto U.S. 1 heading west, Andretti’s face was shoved even harder into the carpeted floor. That shut him up. The car headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike. Just before the I-95 intersection, the limo drove off the turnpike onto a little road that wandered through an expanse of swampy wetlands.

The car eventually eased into an abandoned drive, piled high with garbage, and ground to a halt.

The rear door swung open and Andretti was yanked from the floor, then shoved hard over the hood of the car. He started to sputter, to give them a piece of his mind, but the ugly automatic weapon was now shoved hard up his left nostril. He hushed.