Full Force and Effect

34

Canal Street station was surprisingly quiet, even for ten-fifteen on a weeknight, but a light stream of foot traffic on the stairs headed toward the track. Marleni Allende walked along with the others, all but unaware of her surroundings because her mind was still on her worries.

She passed through the turnstile on her way to the northbound N train, her mind still unable to free itself of the stress of the past few days. She told herself she’d done the right thing, no amount of money would assuage the guilt she would feel for the rest of her life if she succumbed to corruption. She considered herself a good Catholic, and though here in New York she had made many mistakes, finding herself unable to resist running up her credit cards and blowing through her life savings, she at least had the backbone to know that accepting a bribe from shadowy men obviously working for the interests of an evil regime was no way to dig herself out of her troubles.

She wasn’t paying attention at first, so she didn’t notice when, directly in front of her, two young Asian men walked on the platform against the flow of pedestrians heading toward the train. And she became only obliquely aware of them a moment later and took a step to the right because she sensed them in her path and approaching her direction.

When she noticed the two men adjusting their gait to move again in her path, now just fifteen feet away, she looked up. Both men eyed her without reservation and they kept moving toward her.

She slowed her walk in surprise. She didn’t have the training to be instantly fearful, but she thought they were perhaps walking up to her to say something.

At eight feet she sensed rather than saw both men reach inside their jackets.

As her eyes began moving down to see what they were retrieving from inside their coats, her heart lurched in her chest.

Oh, God! They are police and they know.

Just then she felt hands touch her from behind, grasping her at her elbows, and two men formed at her sides and began leading her gently but surely along the platform diagonally, out of the path of the men in front of her.

As she looked up at them, certain she was under arrest, one of them, smiling, spoke in a friendly voice.

“¿Marleni?” he said. “¡No lo creo! ¿Como te vas, amiga?” Marleni? I can’t believe it! How are you doing, friend?

She glanced up and saw the Asian men standing on the platform, their hands still in their coats. Confusion on their faces. The men leading her to the subway didn’t seem to notice them.

“¿Todo bien, chica?” the smaller of the two said. He was on her left, and he continued to guide her toward the track’s edge. He acted like he knew her, and was happy to see her, but it was clearly an act.

“¿Quién es usted?” she asked. Who are you? The man on her right was a little taller, just as dark but bearded, and he shielded her from the two Asian men who were now behind her. A few more people came forward on the platform as the train came to a stop.

The Latino with his hand on her back — from his accent, Marleni had identified him as Mexican — spoke softly now, still in Spanish. “Get on the train with us. It’s okay, we’re friends.”

She did as she was told, not because she understood or trusted him, but only because there were two of them and they moved her forward with gentle but unmistakable force.

When the doors closed, Chavez turned around to look for the two North Koreans, but he couldn’t see through the crowd of people leaving the train and heading for the exit. He thought it possible they had boarded another car, but he hoped the sudden appearance of him and Dom gave them enough pause to slow them down.

Chavez helped the woman to a seat; she was compliant but scared.

He said, “Ms. Allende. I don’t want to alarm you, I am a friend.”

“Who are you?” She clutched her bag. Ding was a forty-seven-year-old Hispanic male in warm-up pants and a gray sweatshirt. While he didn’t look threatening, his approach like this was jarring enough to make Allende wonder if perhaps she was about to be robbed.

“Those men have been following you since you met with Riley. We think it’s possible they were going to hurt you in some way. We can’t let that happen.”

“I don’t know any Riley.”

“He may have given you another name. I am talking about the man you met with at the restaurant on Mott Street twenty minutes ago.”

Allende’s face reddened. “I don’t know—”

“It doesn’t matter what is going on. We just want to make sure you are safe. Please let us escort you back someplace where we can talk.”

“I don’t know what this is all about. Really. I demand to be allowed to call my embassy immediately.”

Chavez said, “You aren’t safe in the subway. We can get you out at the next stop and meet friends at street level who can help us.”

Allende stood suddenly. Her confusion was subsiding quickly, and now she had acquired a sense of authority, even outrage. “I told you. I demand to speak to my embassy.”

The train slowed at the Prince Street station. Dominic moved for the door, his hand hovering at his waist, ready to draw his weapon if any North Korean operatives entered the car.

Ding said, “Okay. You can call whoever you want, but we’ve got to go up to the street, right?”

“I refuse to talk to—”

Dom spun away from the door, moved over to the Chilean UN official, and reached for his wallet. “Pay attention, lady.” He opened his wallet and displayed his Bureau credentials. “I’m FBI. You are coming with us.”

“I have diplomatic immunity.”

“And I don’t give a shit. You are not being arrested, you are being escorted to safety. You need to appreciate what is happening. We’re leaving right now.”

She started to move, but it took her too long.

At the stop a thick crowd of some fifteen people, the majority obviously tourists, were already boarding at the door nearest to Allende before she made it close enough to get off. An equal amount boarded at the door at the front of the car. By the time Chavez and Caruso had her moved through the group, the doors had closed again.

The train began moving.

Ding looked at Dom. “Stand her by the door and keep your head on a swivel. At the next stop we are moving.”

“Roger that.”

If not for the large group of straphangers standing in the middle of the car, Ding and Dom would have seen the two Asian men board from the door between their car and the car forward of them. But the men entered the car and began moving through the crowd, looking for their targets. When they did see the woman and her two mysterious protectors, they were only ten feet away, close to the rear side door. Instantly the North Korean operatives reached inside their coats to the small of their backs.

Caruso and Chavez saw the men right as the guns came out.

The North Koreans drew pistols, pushed a middle-aged woman and her grown daughter out of the way, and the guns rose in the middle of the group of stunned passengers.

The two Campus operatives went into their pants for their own weapons. Dom pulled a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield .40-caliber from inside his waistband under his shirt, and Chavez snatched a Glock 26 nine-millimeter from a Thunderwear holster. As Chavez drew, he stepped in front of Marleni Allende and shielded her with his body.

The North Koreans got the jump on the Americans, but the Americans executed their drawstrokes faster, so the race to get sights on targets was a four-way tie.

The screams and yells of thirty people came last of all.

Within one and a half seconds of the two teams seeing each other in the same train car, the four men had one another at gunpoint, each with two hands on his pistol in a combat grip. Their extended arms and gun barrels meant their muzzles were within eighteen inches of one another.

Men and women all around them dropped to the floor or recoiled out of the way in all directions, but the four professionals stood still as stones in the middle of the train car.

It was clear to Chavez these were North Koreans; he guessed they were members of their foreign intelligence service. He was surprised they were operating in the city with firearms, but, Chavez told himself, a gun was a decent tool for an assassin, so it stood to reason these guys were packing.

Caruso was on Chavez’s right, and as it happened, he had his gun on the man directly in front of Chavez, while Chavez himself was targeting the man just six feet in front of Caruso. The North Koreans had crossed their aim as well. The four weapons formed a near-perfect X that rocked and rolled with the rhythm of the moving train, and Chavez couldn’t help but think about the fact that he and the other three men would catch simultaneous point-blank rounds to the head if anybody on this train car so much as even sneezed.

He pictured what that would look like to the captive audience here. One extra-loud bang and four armed assholes dropping dead to the floor in a massive pool of blood.

That would be one hell of a vacation memory for all the tourists on the train.

No one said anything for the first few seconds, so Chavez took the role of master of ceremonies. “English? Either of you boys speak English?”

Sweat covered the brow of the man at the end of Chavez’s notch-and-post gunsight. Chavez didn’t look at the man in front of him, because that was Dom’s responsibility, and he knew Dom would have that guy covered.

Chavez’s man, dripping with sweat, had eyes that were wide and alert, but he did not seem panicked. He said, “I speak English.”

Chavez nodded. “That’s good.” He smiled a little, trying to bring even the slightest bit of calm to the scene. “This is a mess, huh?”

The North Korean didn’t reply.

Chavez continued, “I bet you and your partner want to go home tonight just like me and my partner. Am I right?”

The North Korean did speak now, but it was low and guttural and in Korean. He was talking to his partner, and while Chavez thought he might have just been translating for his partner’s benefit, it didn’t sound good at all.

The guns wavered a little as the train began a bumpy curve to the left, but still four muzzles were pointed at four faces, and four trigger fingers took up the slack in four triggers.

A female tourist in her thirties started to say something, but Caruso just hushed her without looking.

Chavez said, “Why don’t you two lower your weapons and you walk out of here at the next stop? We’ll let you do it. Matter of fact… we’d love for you to do it.”

The leader of the two shook his head no. Sweat drained down his temples.

The train began to slow for the 8th Street stop. In a voice that was demonstrative but cautious, because he didn’t want to startle the dude with the gun in his face, Dom said, “Everybody relax. I’m a federal officer. Nobody move until we’re stopped, but as soon as the doors open I want everyone to leave the train in a quiet and orderly fashion.”

The North Korean said, “No! No! No one leaves!”

Chavez said, “If either of you take your guns off of us to point them at these civilians, we will shoot you dead.” That sank in for a moment, then Chavez added, “Tell your buddy if he doesn’t understand.”

A college-age man sitting on the bench behind Dom said, “Sir, do you want me to—”

Caruso said, “I want you to do exactly what I just said. Nothing else.”

The subway car was quiet other than the rattling of the movement over the tracks, but when Caruso heard sounds behind him, a slight shuffling of clothing or a purse, he said, “Anybody who pulls out a camera phone will probably get themselves killed, but if you don’t, I’m gonna throw your ass in prison. Stay still!”

The sound behind ceased instantly.

It was a jolting stop at 8th Street; all four men stumbled a little, but the guns were back up and in their X in an instant. The men and women on the train — fortunately, it was late enough at night that no children had been on board — behaved even better than Dom had expected, and in seconds the train was clear.

Marleni Allende was one of the first off. Caruso and Chavez noticed that the North Koreans, though obviously on a life-or-death mission, had the good sense to not try to stop her. They were focused on their difficult predicament.

Caruso expected the train to stay at 8th Street. Surely someone would tell the motorman that there was an armed standoff on his train, and he’d sound the alarm and stay right there. But the doors closed and it began moving again.

He realized they were in the second-to-last car, and perhaps the people who’d scrambled off had been more concerned about getting the hell out of the line of fire and going to the exits and less concerned about running all the way up the platform to the front of the train.

Of course, everyone would be on their mobiles once they got to street level, or else they would tell the first transit cop they came across, so both Caruso and Chavez knew the train wouldn’t make it past Union Square, the next stop.

Chavez tried his hand at dialogue again. “The woman is gone. We can shoot it out over nothing, or we can just call it a night.”

The North Korean said, “We have diplomatic immunity.”

Caruso replied, “Who doesn’t, really, at this point?”

Chavez latched on to this. “Then drop your guns. You haven’t done anything that will get you more than an expulsion. It doesn’t have to end bad.”

The sweat on the Korean’s face made him blink, over and over.

His partner said something in Korean, and the two men started some sort of argument that got heated.

While they shouted at each other, getting more volatile by the second, Caruso spoke softly to Chavez. “They’re losing it.”

Chavez said, “Talking over the consequences of failure.”

Dom took in a slow breath. “Dead-enders.”

Chavez knew what he meant. These guys were coming to the realization they had nothing to lose, and this meant, to both of the Campus operators, they were in the same predicament.

There was going to be a point-blank shootout in a minute, and Chavez and Caruso had nothing to lose at this point, either.

The North Koreans had stopped their arguing, and both Americans took that to mean they had reached a conclusion. The train began to slow at the Union Square station, and all four men softened their knees to absorb the inevitable shift in momentum that came along with pulling into the stop. Although they couldn’t communicate it to each other, the Campus men both felt certain the North Koreans were going to fire right as the train made its final jolt before the doors opened. That was their best opportunity for success, and their best opportunity for escape.

Chavez said, “You trust me, Dom?”

It took Caruso a moment, but soon enough he thought he understood. “I trust you.”

“What are you saying?” shouted the English-speaking North Korean.

“I’m saying I give up,” answered Chavez.

He took his left hand off his gun slowly, and held it up in front of him, like he was telling the man with the gun on him he was going to surrender. Slowly he turned his pistol barrel away, changing his grip on the Glock so the gun rolled forward on his trigger finger. It hung upside down in his hand, the grip facing away from him. He turned away from the man he had been aiming at, and toward the man directly in front of him. “Here. Take it.”

As he said this, the man in front of Chavez, the one with the gun pointed at Caruso, took his eyes off his sights for an instant to look up at the man offering his gun to him. A change in the dynamic caused him a half-second of surprise as he reevaluated the situation.

As soon as his eyes shifted, Dominic Caruso swiveled his body to the right and shot the other North Korean, the man with the gun on Chavez, in the forehead.

The man with the gun pointed at Caruso startled at the movement, and his eyes flicked back toward his gunsight. He recognized he’d been caught off guard, looking at one man and aiming at another, but he was still on target, and he jerked his finger against the taut trigger of his semiautomatic.

But he never got a shot off.

Chavez flicked his pistol around in his hand so the grip was in his palm and his pinkie finger was inside the trigger guard. Though the weapon was upside down, the barrel pointed at the aggressor in front of him. He pulled his pinkie back and fired the pistol upside down. The round hit the North Korean in the upper chest and knocked him backward. He stumbled back, and his gun fired once into the ceiling of the train.

Dom Caruso swiveled his Smith & Wesson to the falling man and shot him twice more before he hit the floor.

The train lurched to a stop. Out the windows on the platform the two Campus operators saw a sea of dark blue uniforms running down the staircase twenty-five yards away. The police weren’t sure which car they were going for, so there was confusion at the bottom of the stairs.

Chavez turned toward the back of the train, away from the police, and started running. “We’re going for the tunnel!”

They leapt down to the tracks in the gap between the last two cars. Careful to avoid going anywhere near the third rail, they took off to the south.

Two cars behind them, the transit police held their weapons on all the cars. It would be thirty seconds before they boarded and another minute and a half before they suspected someone had left the train to run through the tunnel.

By then Caruso and Chavez were halfway back to 8th Street.

By the time they got to the 8th Street station, Caruso and Chavez had moved to the southbound side of the tracks. Since all the witnesses had climbed out of the subway car onto the northbound platform, the two Campus men expected there would be a police presence at the scene there, and they were right. A dozen or more police in light blue and dark blue uniforms, some carrying carbines or submachine guns, stood around with witnesses and other passersby.

But Chavez and Caruso climbed up on the southbound platform, fifty yards away from the gaggle of cops across the station, and they made it up to street level with no one noticing them.

Sam picked them up a few minutes later and they were back in the 79th Street safe house shortly after that.

By the time Domingo and Dominic sat down with a bottle of water and a gun-cleaning kit, Campus IT staffers had already reviewed all the relevant NYPD and Metropolitan Transportation Authority camera footage in the area, and they saw nothing that identified their two operatives. There was always a chance some kid on the train had gotten his phone out, but this wasn’t an event likely to have been recorded, for the simple fact that everyone on that train was in immediate mortal peril and knew reaching for a phone or raising a hand to point a camera might have earned them a bullet to the head.

After spending hours on an after-action hot wash of the event with Clark in the living room of the safe house, they determined they had somehow managed to avoid compromise during the incident. No one had any idea just why the North Koreans were so hell-bent on killing a single member of the Sanctions Committee, but Sam’s assertion that Allende and Riley had not managed to come to terms on whatever it was they were meeting about made them all think it likely Riley had notified the North Koreans that the woman knew about the operation to coerce committee members, and the North Koreans decided to silence her before she could talk.

There was a lot of guessing necessary to come to this conclusion, but the facts all seemed to lead in this direction.

Clark said, “Just like in Vietnam, the North Koreans are playing for absolute keeps on this. In situations where some other bad actor might just pull up stakes and bug out, or else threaten a noncompliant party, the North Koreans are using lethal means. This is an ugly game they are playing, and we cannot make assumptions about how they will act without taking that into consideration.”