Carolers sang, “It came upon a midnight clear.”

But it wasn’t yet midnight, and it wasn’t clear. Snow whispered down, a cold powder that reflected colorful lights hanging on adobe buildings beyond an intersection ahead. Even the traffic lights appeared festive.

“What a perfect Christmas Eve,” a woman marveled, proceeding with the crowd on Alameda Street. The Spanish word alameda referred to the poplars that had rimmed the street years earlier when it had been only a lane. Although cottonwoods had long since replaced those poplars, the street remained narrow, the sidewalk barely accommodating the crush of people coming from mass at St. Francis Cathedral or from the ice sculptures in Santa Fe’s four-hundred-year-old wooded square, known as the Plaza.

“You think the lights in the Plaza are something?” the woman’s companion told her. “Wait’ll you see Canyon Road. A mile of decorations. You’ll be glad you came to visit for the holidays. People travel from all over the world to see Santa Fe at Christmas. You know what it means, don’t you? ‘Santa Fe’?”

“At the hotel, I heard somebody call it the City Different.”

“That’s just its nickname. Santa Fe was settled by the Spanish. The name means ‘Holy Faith.’ It’s perfect for this time of year.”

“Peace on Earth, goodwill to men ...”

Moving with the crowd, the man in the black ski jacket didn’t care about peace or goodwill. He was forty-five, but the effects of his hard life had made him look older. He had big shoulders and creased features, and he saw with the tunnel vision of a hunter so that objects on each side of him registered only as blurs. For him, sounds diminished as well. The carolers, the cathedral bells, the exclamations of delight at the holiday displays—all of these lessened as he focused solely on his quarry. There were only fifteen people between them.

The target wore a navy parka, but despite the falling snow, he had the hood shoved back, allowing a cold layer of white to accumulate on his head. The pursuer understood. A man on the run couldn’t allow the sides of a hood to obstruct his view of what lay on each side. Desperate to find an escape route, the fugitive saw differently than a hunter, not with tunnel vision but with an intense awareness of everything around him.

The killer kept his hands in the pockets of his ski jacket. Inside the pockets were slits that made it easy for him to reach the two pistols he had holstered on his belt under his jacket. Each weapon had a sound suppressor. One was a 10-millimeter Glock, chosen because of its power and because the rifling in Glock barrels blurred the striations on bullets fired from them. As a consequence, crime-scene investigators found it almost impossible to link those bullets to any particular gun.

But if everything went as planned, the force of the Glock wouldn’t be necessary. Instead, the second pistol—a .22 Beretta—would be chosen for its subtlety. Even without a suppressor, the small-caliber gun made little noise. But with a suppressor, and with subsonic ammunition designed for Santa Fe’s 7,000 feet of altitude, the .22 was about as quiet as a pistol could be. Equally important, its lesser power meant that the bullet it fired wasn’t likely to jeopardize the mission by going through the target and hitting the precious object hidden under his parka.

“...to hear the angels sing.”