CHAPTER THIRTEENThey strapped Matthew face down on the makeshift altar on which Helen had been killed. Caleb had not been able to keep from telling him what they had done to her: Matthew could smell the blood that had drained into the wood.
Helen had - Caleb recounted with excitement - been buried in the foundations of Nahum’s Temple, in a hole they had dug that would, in due course, lie beneath the focus of future meditations and masses. In Christian terms, they had buried her beneath the cross itself. They had buried her and covered her body in concrete and burned the plastic sheeting. Only the altar itself had not been burned by the time Matthew drove the now weary Lincoln up to the near-deserted complex and demanded:
“Where’s Helen?”
“Everything everybody can think of - that’s the o
