Had Lindsay seen him? He was right outside their home. If she happened to look out the window she could get help…

He felt his knees being bent, and his arms pulled together behind his back. Before David knew it, he was hog-tied and tossed on something flat and metallic. He landed with a loud and painful thud. A metallic door slammed shut. The ambient noises of the street grew dull. He was pretty sure that he was inside a car trunk or the back of a van.

There were no voices. No jingle of keys. A faint vibration told him that an engine was already running. Then a jolt of motion shifted his body. They were on the go. Shit.

David had been kidnapped in the blink of an eye. But there were no eyes that had seen it. David was pretty sure that no one in his neighborhood had been outside in the rain. Lindsay would be in the kitchen or the playroom, neither of which had a view of the street. In those hapless few seconds, the safe and normal world that David had known came to an end.

The routine Friday night had turned into a night blinded in a cell. He would have been sitting down with Lindsay and the girls right now. Instead, David was left alone with his panic. Rapid streams of thought flowed through his mind as his body jerked with each turn of the vehicle. This wasn’t just a mugging. It was a kidnapping. Who had taken him? What could they possibly want?

His job. It had to be his job.

David worked at In-Q-Tel. It was a venture-capital firm unlike any other. In-Q-Tel was a non-profit firm in Arlington, Virginia. Its sole purpose was to invest in and secure the most advanced information technology for use by the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. His job was to identify and evaluate these new technologies that could be acquired and used by the government.

The people who had taken him must want information on something he’d worked on. Some technology. David jumped from project to project every few months. He had worked there for a number of years now. They could be after information on any number of dozens of highly classified projects.

David tried to think. They had spoken his name in English. He tried to remember if there was an accent. He didn’t think so. If they were terrorists, would they have an accent? David was way out of his league. He had been in the Navy for a while. But he had been an officer for only a few months before being let go due to a combination of bad eyesight and budget cuts. He had never deployed or done anything really exciting. His current job was equally mundane. It sounded a lot more interesting than it really was. He spent his first few years out of the Navy working for In-Q-Tel as a low-level tech researcher. His recent promotion meant that he traveled more and got to work on the higher priority projects. But it was still research. David got all of his information about terrorists and spies from books, TV, and the occasional NPR story. If he had to guess, these guys were probably from a foreign government.