MARLENE HEARD THE TELEPHONE RING ONCE AND STOP. SHE surmised that it was the call her husband had been expecting and that he’d picked it up quickly so as not to wake her or the twins. Nor was she in a hurry to get up. A petite woman, she was enjoying the feeling of being lost in a giant ocean of a bed on Christmas morning. Keeping her eyes closed, she nestled down into the luxury of goose-down comforters and German flannel sheets and smiled at the thought of her amorous visit from “Santa Claus” the night before, after the proverbial stockings had been hung by the chimney with care and a glass of Merlot had been enjoyed.
She could just make out Butch’s deep, resonant voice and listened for a clue to how the conversation was going. When he laughed, she sighed happily. It meant that he could relax for the last few days of their vacation . . . and so could she, having insisted that he could leave Manhattan without the forces of evil overrunning the city.
As a result, they’d had the most peaceful, relaxed family time she could remember in many years, and now she could rest easy, knowing that her insistence hadn’t backfired. Butch had even been able to drop his official lawman visage and enjoy a visit from his uncle, Vladimir Karchovski, and cousin, Yvgeny—both of them Russian gangsters in Brooklyn, who’d helped Butch save many innocent people on more than one occasion. In Taos, they were just family members celebrating Hanukkah.
Inhaling deeply, Marlene savored the scent of knotty pine and fresh desert sage. Why can’t it ever smell like this in New York City?
Butch wasn’t the only one who’d entertained the idea of retiring to New Mexico. They could certainly afford it. After leaving the DAO, where she’d first met her husband when they were both young assistant district attorneys, she’d started a firm that specialized in providing security services for VIPs. The company had merged with a larger firm, and when its board of directors decided to go public with a stock offering, she’d cashed out of the security game for millions.
Butch made a good living at the DAO, too. Nothing like what she was worth or what he could have earned in private practice, but their lives would still have been quite comfortable without her bankroll.
Especially with their quiet lifestyle. They still lived in the same three-bedroom loft on the corner of Crosby and Grand in SoHo that she’d owned when they first met. He’d bought a small loft across Crosby for her to use as an art studio, and the kids went to private schools, but those were their only real extravagances. They didn’t go on expensive vacations or own a summer home on Long Island or decorate the loft with expensive rugs and overpriced art pieces, though her collection of contemporary New York artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns wasn’t shabby, either. She had a truck that was usually parked in a garage two blocks from the loft for six hundred dollars a month, but Butch didn’t own a car. As an old-school New Yorker, he preferred to let others deal with the hassles of owning automobiles and negotiating Manhattan traffic.
So money was not the problem if they wanted to move, but she doubted she’d ever be able to get her husband to leave New York or the DAO.
Butch had spent a lot of his time off catching up on his reading—books he never seemed to have time for back in New York, reading two pages a night before falling asleep exhausted by his day at the office. He’d also taken an interest in Taos and its remarkable history. Like his twin boys, he’d been disappointed that they couldn’t visit the ancient Taos Pueblo; a thousand years old, the multistoried complex of apartments built of red-brown adobe was the longest continuously occupied community in North America. However, while it was otherwise open to the public, during the winter months only the two thousand members of the tribe were allowed on the reservation by tribal law.
Not all of Butch’s Wild West vacation fantasy was lost. There were the museums and places of historical interest, such as the plaza. And although he’d tried to hide it, she knew he’d been delighted to be asked on several occasions to “ride the range” on horseback with his future son-in-law, Ned Blanchett, who was the foreman of a local ranch, and their Indian friend, John Jojola, the former police chief of the Taos Indian Pueblo.
After the first invitation, Marlene knew that her straight-laced husband would be too self-conscious to get into the spirit of the thing without a push, so she’d gone shopping and bought him a dark gray Stetson, size 16 cowboy boots, and a “Marlboro Man” leather coat with a fleece lining and collar. When he emerged from their bedroom dressed and ready on the morning of his first ride, he’d blushed and then tried to scowl as he muttered, “I look ridiculous.” But the scowl had quickly turned into a boyish grin when she jumped into the arms of “my long tall cowboy” and told him that if he played his cards right later, she might let him keep the hat and boots on. He’d returned that afternoon with his eyes glittering as he described the mare he’d ridden as “a nice little filly” and told her how exciting it had been watching real horsemen like Ned and John race across the prairie while he and “Sally” trotted along behind.
Giggling at the memory, Marlene rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. She could hear Butch still talking, but judging by the tenor and occasional chuckle, it sounded as if the conversation was now purely social. There were no other noises indicating the presence of their fourteen-year-old twins, Isaac and Giancarlo. The trip had been good for the boys, too. They’d spent as much time as they could snowboarding at the Taos Mountain ski resort, guided by Jojola’s son, Charlie, with whom they’d quickly bonded. Charlie was sixteen and could drive, so when they weren’t on the slopes, they’d explored the surrounding mountains and prairie.
She wondered what they’d think of spending their high school years in Taos instead of New York. Gotham could be a rough place to grow up, even if you weren’t the sons of the district attorney. But that fact seemed to destine them to having a target drawn on their backs for every criminal, terrorist, and wacko who had a beef with their dad.
Which brought to mind her first child, Lucy, who was engaged to Ned and planning a July wedding. She and Lucy had spent many happy hours going over plans, invitations, and guest lists. Yet each task brought with it a touch of sadness. Her only daughter had chosen New Mexico over Manhattan, a cowboy over a city boy; this was her home now, and there would be long periods of time between visits.
Who would have figured? Marlene thought as she glanced over at the big bedroom window, where the soft morning light was stealing in around the edges of the curtains. Lucy had spent almost her entire life on the island of Manhattan, until the age of twenty-one, when she’d traveled to New Mexico with her mother, the two of them seeking to heal wounds both physical and spiritual.
That was when Lucy had been recovering from her ordeal at the hands of the brutal sociopath Felix Tighe. And there was no better way to overcome the depredations of an evil like Tighe than in the arms of a good and loving man, whom she’d found in Ned Blanchett, a ranch hand her husband later described as “the quintessential Western Man archetype.” When Marlene had returned to New York, Lucy remained behind for Ned, and it was soon apparent that the move was permanent.
After what Lucy had been through with Tighe and, like the rest of the family, a plethora of other killers, kidnappers, and psychopaths, Marlene had been happy for her. She had hoped her firstborn would now enjoy a safe, secure life as a wife and mother ensconced on a ranch. But it wasn’t to be, at least not for the time being.
Fluent in more than sixty languages, with varying degrees of fluency in more than a dozen others, Lucy, with her sharpshooting fiancé, had been recruited into a top-secret counterterrorism agency by an old family friend and FBI agent, Espey Jaxon. The small group was independent of the traditional agencies, including the Bureau and even the umbrella National Security Administration, with orders to discover and disrupt terrorist activities domestic and international. Apparently, Jaxon reported only to some entity so top-secret that even the young couple had not been told. But it meant that their lives would be anything but safe and secure. New Mexico would be their home, but their duties had already carried them far beyond the borders of the United States and into dangers worse than what even the Big Apple offered.
Marlene noted that the deep rumble of her husband’s voice had stopped, and she assumed that his business with Clay Fulton was done for the moment. She allowed herself a brief fantasy that he was about to come into the room and announce that he wanted to stay in Taos, that the years of working in a pressure cooker like the New York DAO were over. But the thought lasted about as long as a soap bubble before bursting into reality.
For better or worse, her husband was the district attorney of New York County, a job he saw more as a calling than as a career. And that was just the half of it. In the past few years, and for whatever reason, he’d become increasingly entangled in terrorist plots against his city—often connected to his role as the chief law-enforcement official on the island and the point man for the Five Boroughs Anti-Terrorism Task Force but outside his official duties as district attorney.
Lucy, a devout Catholic who believed that she carried on conversations with the ghost of a fifteenth-century saint, thought that her father’s and the family’s roles were preordained as part of a wider battle between good and evil, of angels and demons and humans who lined up on either side. But for Butch Karp, being a religious person did not equate to observing the rituals of the Jewish calendar; religion to him was having a moral and ethical code of Judaism.
With a sigh, Marlene rolled out of bed and walked over to the window, where she pulled back the curtains and looked out on a breathtakingly beautiful Christmas morning with the town of Taos glistening under a blanket of new snow. As she turned, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She knew that she was still an attractive woman, with a lithe yet curvy body, but there was no denying the vanguard of middle age was upon her. It was getting harder to keep up with the strands of gray that invaded her black curls; the lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth were deeper and longer. Her hand went up to the side of her face where she had lost an eye so many years earlier after opening a letter bomb intended for Butch. A glass eye stared back at her unemotionally.
The bigger changes were those she couldn’t see. In the years when she had been protecting important people from threats, she also got involved in helping abused women deal with violent men—even taking the law into her own hands when the police couldn’t or wouldn’t help. The violence and darkness that had followed seemed to spiral downward from there, whether it was protecting her family from others or finding herself allied with men like David Grale against Lucy’s “forces of evil.” She’d killed men, and while it could be argued, as Butch had, that much of her violent tendencies had been brought on in self-defense or in defense of others, she’d increasingly been disturbed by the thought that she was playing God, deciding who deserved to live and who deserved to die. And it had affected her relationship with Butch, to whom vigilantes were anathema to his belief that the rule of law was sacrosanct to Western civilization.
Marlene gave herself a smile in the mirror. Yes, there’s hope for you yet, she thought.
There was still no sound from the twins. All of her children were growing up and would soon leave, like Lucy. In past years on Christmas morning, the boys had hardly let the sky grow gray before bursting into their parents’ bedroom and jumping around like squirrels after nuts in their avarice. Butch had purposely made a game of taking his time getting out of bed, just to hear the desperate pleas in their voices before releasing them to wreak havoc on the poor presents.
What are you going to do with yourself when the boys are gone, too? The thought brought a lump to her throat, and tears filled her good eye as she opened the door of the bedroom and stepped out into the hallway. She found her husband in the living room, sitting in one of the big leather chairs, reading the sports section of the Times.
“Merry Christmas, Santa,” she purred when he looked up and smiled at her.
“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Claus,” he replied. “The boys must really be sawing logs.”
“Teenagers,” she noted. “They can stay up all night but need their beauty rest in the morning.”
“When are Lucy and Ned coming over?”
“After mass,” Marlene replied. In the incongruity of the Karp-Ciampi clan, their twin boys were still preparing for their bar mitzvahs—after their studies had been interrupted by the recent Karp family confrontations with evil—while their daughter was attending Roman Catholic mass.
After fixing herself a cup of coffee, Marlene sat down next to her husband and picked up the news section of the Times. “Hey, did you see this story with your old chum Harley Chin?” she asked.
Karp rolled his eyes. “Yeah, never met a camera he didn’t like.”
“So, did you get your Christmas present from Clay?”
“I did indeed. He will be waiting for me in the Tombs upon our return.”
Marlene looked at her husband. She thought he was incredibly handsome, and that got her motor running. “I don’t suppose you want to give me my Christmas present again?” she said, and nodded toward the bedroom.
Butch laughed. “I suppose you’ve been a good girl this year . . .”
“Oh, yes, Santa,” she cooed, “so very good. I think I want—”
Whatever she was going to say was interrupted by the sudden sound of the boys jumping out of bed and pounding their way into the hall.
“Guess it will have to wait.” She sighed.
“Damn kids,” he agreed, smiling before turning to where the twins were emerging from the hall. “Why, Merry Christmas. We were beginning to wonder if you guys had decided to forgo presents this year.”
“No way, José,” Zak replied.
“Nice try, Dad,” Giancarlo added. “Now, which ones are mine?”