Introduction

One group focused on destroying all religion.

One group struggling to preserve the church.

One woman searching for the truth.

For two months, small-town lawyer Bethany Barclay had been mourning the hit-and-run death of her enigmatic best friend, Annabelle Seaver. Then the son of her wealthiest client is found murdered in her kitchen. When Bethany herself becomes the leading suspect, she must flee both the authorities and a mysterious killer.

But there is more at stake than she knows.

Bethany is caught in the web of a shadowy organization determined to destroy Christianity. The final outcome rests on her ability to piece together the last three months of her best friend’s life.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

As lawyers go, Bethany Barclay was nobody, especially in the District of Columbia and its environs, where every attorney who matters is in a big firm or in government service or shuttling between the two. Bethany had a small practice way out in Virginia, and therefore counted less than zero in legal circles. But the nightmare swept her up all the same.

The beginning was deceptively normal: a May afternoon crisp with sunshine, the first fair day after what seemed a month of rain. Bethany was in her office, behind her desk, massaging her temples and trying to work out the cause of her lingering migraine. The candidates were—one—that it was less than a week until Mother's Day, an occasion Bethany would observe as usual in North Carolina with Aunt Claudia, whom she loved and dreaded. Or—two—that before leaving on Friday for the six-hour drive, she would likely be laying off Will, her paralegal, whom she had kept on well past the point where she could afford him, the solo practice of law being what it was. Bethany adored Will, and his wife, and their baby, and cringed at the thought of wrecking their already shaky fisc, but her accountant had laid the figures before her, and she knew she had no choice. Unless of course she dipped into her mad money, the several thousand dollars she kept in cash and inviolate, because her mad father had taught her always to have ready to hand the means for getting out of town in a hurry.

Candidate number three involved the lingering effects of her lunch with Thelma McKittrick, who sought to enlist Bethany in her doomed campaign to bring liturgical dance to their church, an Episcopal congregation dating to before the Revolution.

"We're so old-fashioned," said Thelma.

"I think people like it that way," said Bethany, remembering how the senior warden had recently sent out a note reminding the members of the impropriety of applause during Sunday services.

The fourth possible cause of the searing migraine was the failure of Bethany's most recent foray into the world of self-discipline, an effort that had ended two nights ago, her nemesis the package of Oreo Minis in the cabinet above the refrigerator. No doubt Aunt Claudia would spend half the weekend tut-tutting, but then would reassure Bethany in her gently devastating way that there were men (a few men, Claudia would say) who preferred their women a little stout. The fifth candidate was tonight's dinner at her cousin Eva's, over in Warrenton, an event almost certain to be heralded by the presence of yet another unsuitable man. Bethany knew she would be required to feign a degree of interest, the better to fortify herself against the barrage of sweet reminders she would soon be suffering from Aunt Claudia, who was bound to point out that Bethany would be thirty in three months, which in her aunt's cosmology was the magical age at which eligible bachelors vanished from the face of the earth.

But perhaps the most likely cause of Bethany's migraine was candidate number six, the fact that at this moment, here in her inner office, a furious client was threatening a malpractice suit—or, more precisely, the only son of a former client, Mrs. Kirkland, who had died last week. Ken Kirkland, the son in question, had been all but written out of his mother's will, as had his two sisters, so of course they blamed the lawyer who had done the writing, and that lawyer was Bethany.

"Did you really think I'd let you get away with this?" He pounded a fist into a palm. "We're going to sue you for everything you've got!"

"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to have gotten away with," said Bethany, fingers digging into her palms to keep her voice calm as the headache grew bright and sharp. She was the sort of churchgoer who was more familiar with the Book of Common Prayer than the Bible, but her Aunt Claudia had taught her to recite Proverbs 3:5–6 in her head whenever the stress threatened to become unbearable. She recited it now, and felt her breathing slow.

Her serenity was like a goad to him. "I'm serious, Bethany. You make this right or you're finished in this town."

Ken was now pacing her office, the back room on the first floor of a period Victorian cottage on Route 522, now converted to professional space. A dentist had the suite upstairs, and the whine of his drill was buzzing through the ceiling, as it did several times each day.

"I did what my client asked me to," she said. "Your dispute is with your late mother, not me."

Ken spun around, brown eyes wild, and for a mad moment she thought he was going to slap her. Payback. After all, Bethany had slapped his face twelve years ago almost to the day, when he had attempted to take certain untoward liberties after the senior prom at Pennville High. Kenny, as he was known in those days, captained the Pennville football team, and considered the girls in the school his natural property. A fair number were complaisant, but Bethany had been raised otherwise. Her college roommate used to tease her about wanting to save herself for her husband, but Aunt Claudia, who raised her, liked to say that being exactly unlike everybody else was what made a woman attractive.

"Come on, Beth." Ken had to know she hated the nickname, but at least his voice had dropped a few decibels. She reminded herself that the Kirklands were a power out here. His grandfather had built a local empire in real estate, and in rural Virginia, land was everything. Ken now controlled a piece of the empire, but his mother had controlled a much bigger piece; and had left very little of her fortune to her children.

"Your client was non compos mentis," Ken was saying. "Seriously." He had slipped over to the charming, syrupy tone that was supposed to make her melt. Ken was the sort who could switch moods in an instant, because none of them were real. His spit-shined black boots with side buckles, eight hundred dollars a pair, winked at her as they caught the sunlight. "My mother was declining for years. She wasn't in any shape to make decisions about her legal affairs."

"She seemed fine to me," Bethany said, or started to, but her cell phone beeped. "Wait," she said, lifting a finger. A text message, from an unknown sender:

don't listen to him

Bethany stared at the screen. The throbbing in her temple continued to bloom. She rubbed the spot. A coincidence, she decided. A joke. The message pertained to something else entirely, not the self-important small-town poohbah looming over her desk. She snapped the phone closed. Her hand trembled. Ken noticed. He noticed everything, especially where women were concerned.

"Are you okay?" he asked, voice rich with sympathy. He gestured toward the phone. "Bad news?"

A coincidence, she reminded herself. Nothing to do with Kenneth Kirkland. Because the alternative was to put the text message in the same mental box with a lot of other odd things that had happened over the past few weeks, like the woman in the mirrored sunglasses who kept showing up in the aisle next to hers at the supermarket and the CVS, and the silver Jeep she had noticed parked outside her house a couple of times, and all the other peculiar little distractions she had endured in the two months since the car ran Annabelle down—and if Bethany started thinking along those lines, she would have to concede not only that she was getting paranoid at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, but that she had something to be paranoid about.

The thought of Annabelle brought a cascade of memories she had managed, with difficulty, to keep at bay. They had called each other running buddies, and had been best friends since rooming together freshman year at Barnard. True, Bethany had been a follower of the rules, a hard worker, a bit of a loner, and Annabelle quite the opposite on every count; but both had been raised by powerful, pious aunts, and they turned out to have commonalities galore. They had traveled the world together, shared stories of bad employers and bad dates, and the last time they had laid eyes on each other, when Annabelle visited last November, they had quarreled—

Tears were suddenly very close. Bethany stood up, fighting the pain of the pounding migraine; and of her best friend's passing. In her mind, she switched to Psalm 16, another of Aunt Claudia's favorites, and forced a smile onto her round face. "I'm sorry, Ken. I have to be at the other end of town. If you have a complaint about the will, you should file your objection in the probate court."

He leaned closer. "This is personal, isn't it?" he said, with the executioner's gentleness. "You're still mad at me after all these years." He lifted a hand, and likely would have touched her face had she not stepped hastily back. "My mother was nuts, but you changed her will anyway. It was to get back at me, wasn't it?"

Naturally. In the world of Kenneth Kirkland, everything that happened was about him. Bethany said, "This has nothing to do with—"

Her phone beeped.

She looked down, grew queasy. "Gotta go," she said.

Five minutes later, Bethany was in her sensible Volvo XC90, eggshell blue, cruising along the county highway toward her cousin's house, trying to summon a little optimism about the matchmaking to be endured, determined not to worry about Ken's silly threats, and refusing absolutely to think about the last text message:

tell him his mother was sane

I'm nobody, Bethany kept telling herself as she drove far too fast through the sun-dappled meadows of her changing county: miles of grazing cattle broken here and there by the rising weekend mansions of the Washington rich. I'm nobody, she repeated, and things like this don't happen to nobodies, it's all my imagination, none of this is real. On and on she whispered her comforting mantra, unaware that she would never be nobody again.

CHAPTER 2

The tricky part of building a bomb is surviving the experience," the specialist was saying. "The science is trivial. A ten-year-old could do it. There are parts of the world where ten-year-olds do do it. Those"—sweeping a hand toward the shelves—"are made with plastique. A little easier to mold, a lot safer to build with, but harder to obtain, and illegal to possess. Whereas this one"—indicating the work table, where he had been grinding metal into shavings—"is going to be thermite."

"It looks like tinfoil," said the woman sitting beside him. The room was cramped and shadowy, the only illumination the halogen lamp mounted on a pole beside the table. She felt uneasy, alone like this with this peculiar little man and the implements of his deadly trade, but he knew what he was doing, and she had to learn.

The specialist nodded. He wore thin sterile surgical gloves, and a metal smock. His fingers moved with delicate authority. "Aluminum foil, actually. We're going to use iron oxide to excite the oxidation process in the aluminum. This will produce a reaction that generates something like 2,000 degrees Celsius." He was pouring a mixture of metallic powders, silver and brown, into a metal cigar case. "That's twice as hot as, say, napalm." He looked at her. "Do you believe in God?"

"No."

"The afterlife?"

"No."

"In that case you might want to back off a little. If the thermite should ignite accidentally, it will burn through me and you in milliseconds. It will incinerate the table and the chairs. Then it will burn a hole in the floor."

Her stomach somersaulted. "The floor is concrete."

"Precisely."

She slid several feet away, watched while he measured magnesium for the fuse. She wished he hadn't made her join him in this creepy room. She didn't understand why he couldn't have met her somewhere and handed over the bomb. But she had been instructed not to upset his aplomb for any reason.

"There's some disagreement about the proper ratio." He shined a penlight into the tube, tamped down the contents, added more powder. "Some people say four-to-one, some will tell you three-to-two. I myself have found that two-to-one is ideal if the ignition is enclosed."

"If thermite is so dangerous," she asked, too loudly, "why don't we use plastic explosive? You have plenty."

"Number one, plastique is too sophisticated. This one has to look like anyone could have made it." He cut the magnesium panel with a pair of clippers, leaving the edge ragged. He twisted it into the cigar case, and left the end hanging out. "Number two, the plastique is easier for the authorities to trace."

"I thought we wanted it traced."

"In time. Not yet. Later. Hand me the cap."

She picked up the freshly machined plug for the case, also made of magnesium. It occurred to her that she wasn't wearing gloves, and it evidently occurred to him, too, because he polished the surface with a silk cloth, rubbing away her prints. Then he held the plug beneath a magnifier, turning it this way and that, inspecting it for she knew not what.

"Are you almost done?" she asked. The thought of her body incinerating still had her nerves tingling.

"This is the last one." Apparently satisfied, the specialist screwed the cap onto the cigar case. He laid it beside three others in its own specially cut groove in a metal cylinder. "The thermite isn't an explosive in the strict sense. But when you burn it in the tight cylinder, the gases and heat have nowhere to go, so the cylinder explodes. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Does dying frighten you?"

"Of course it does."

"Do you wish to die gloriously? To etch your name in history?"

"Not particularly."

"Then perhaps you are not suited for this work. The best bombers accept that their own deaths might be required." He held the cylinder toward her. "Here. Come closer. Look. You open the bottom. Like so. Coiled inside the bottom is the fuse, a filament wire, also magnesium. You extend it. Be careful. The wire is fragile. Don't break it, or the bomb will fail. You light it—here—with an igniter."

"Then what?"

"Then you run. Fast. You will have perhaps two minutes to get clear."

She swallowed. "That isn't much time."

"You wanted portable, I built portable."

The woman stiffened. "Why can't I use a timer? Or a remote control?"

"They add weight and they are not reliable. Also, you want to make her out a fanatic. This is the sort of risk a fanatic would take." He laid the box aside. "Also, you wanted crude. This is crude. You say she has a workshop."

"A shed in the backyard."

He handed her a plastic bag. "These are filings from when I machined the magnesium. Scatter a few. Not many. And only in corners or under furniture. It must look as if she tried very hard to clean up."

"Maybe I should leave a few in plain sight. To make sure they're found."

"No. Do exactly as I say, and don't improvise. You must not make matters too easy, or the authorities may grow suspicious. This way, not only will the forensic people find the filings, but they will be proud of themselves for their cleverness."

She turned the bag in her hands, watching in fascination as the dull gray filings tumbled. He was right. Two or three, no more, piled in with other dust and debris. Add it to the other carefully planted evidence, all of it showing signs of attempted concealment, and their target would soon be the sole suspect. She almost felt sorry for the poor woman.

Almost.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Church Builder by A. L. Shields. Copyright © 2013 A. L. Shields. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Discussion Questions

1. The objective of the Wilderness is to undermine and destroy religious belief itself at any cost. Much of what they do is to create false perceptions within society. How do you think that this relates to our current culture?

2. In the story, Bethany finds herself thrown into a web of lies and manipulation. What would you have done if you found yourself framed for something you didn’t do?

3. At one point, Bethany finds a brief moment of refuge in a church. The phrase on the sign outside drawing her in, ‘Are you running forward or you just running away?’ What do you think this means?

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