Gone To Glory. Ron/Janet Benrey

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      It had been a snap decision—but an inspired one, Lori thought—to tell Reverend Hartman that she wanted to take pictures of the stained-glass windows from outside the church. Now she was perfectly positioned on the church’s lawn, adjacent to King Street, to listen in on the meeting in the pastor’s office.

      Lori reached deep into her oversize black-leather camera case, into a small compartment near the bottom. The gadget she found resembled a plastic candy bar but was the single most expensive item in the bag. It was a bugging device—a remote sound monitor—that could surveil a room a hundred yards away. She began to mount the innocuous-looking gadget on the top of her tripod.

      Her hand slipped. She caught the remote sound monitor before it hit the ground.

      Easy girl. You’re still shaking.

      Lori inhaled slowly, counted to five and then exhaled. She’d almost lost her composure when, without any warning, she was introduced to George Ingles in the reverend’s office. She hadn’t expected to run into the one person in Glory she absolutely, positively had to meet. And amazingly he had turned out to be a flirtatious jerk.

      Perhaps that will come in handy someday?

      Two more gifts of fabulous luck. In fact, things were going almost too well. When would the good fortune run out?

      Lori drove the unpleasant thought out of her head and asked herself a more productive question: what were George and the pastor meeting about?

      She immediately offered herself an answer: the church’s finances. What else would Daniel Hartman have to talk about with George Ingles?

      “You’ll know for sure in about thirty seconds,” she murmured, “if you can get this silly gadget working.”

      Lori tried again to attach the tripod’s screw to the bottom of the remote monitor. This time the threads engaged; she tightened the screw gently and made sure that the working side of the device was pointed toward Reverend Hartman’s window. She knew that there were two nearly invisible lens openings on the front edge. One lens had an infrared laser behind it, the other a sensitive optical detector.

      The device was really quite simple in principle: it directed an invisible beam of infrared light at the pastor’s office window and picked up some of the light reflected off the glass. The cleverness of the device lay in its ability to detect tiny vibrations of the window glass caused by the sound waves generated by people talking inside the room.

      She placed a small earpiece in her left ear—the same kind of wireless earphone that many cell phone users wear—and activated a small switch on the bottom of the sound monitor. Now came the tricky part: she would have to aim the laser beam at the pastor’s window while nonchalantly appearing to do something else.

      She picked up her camera and stared at its controls while she slowly moved the tripod’s pan and tilt head.

      Lori’s earpiece came to life. “…she’ll be here with lunch soon, George. She’s bringing sandwiches from Snacks of Glory. I like them even better than their burgers.”

      A burger would taste terrific about now.

      Lori abruptly felt hungry. She wished that she had bought a Glorious SOGgy Burger when she had the chance. All she had with her now was a half-eaten granola bar and a small bottle of water. They would have to do until the meeting was over. The conversation going on in the pastor’s office was far more important than her hunger.

      “Then maybe we should talk about a special stewardship campaign before she arrives.” Lori immediately identified the speaker as George Ingles. It was easy to tell him and the pastor apart because Reverend Hartman’s voice dripped with authority. What else would you expect from a man who had been a U.S. Army chaplain for more than twenty years and had risen to the rank of full colonel?

      She recalled the brief encounter in his office. Daniel Hartman also moved with authority, and he was better-looking than any clergyman she could remember—not that she had dealt with all that many men of the cloth. She had his photograph—a large color shot of him in his full dress Army uniform—safely stored in her laptop computer, along with the rest of the dossier that Kevin Pomeroy had provided. Hartman was forty-eight, but looked much younger. He was over six feet tall, fair-complected, with lively hazel eyes and a full head of reddish-brown hair. He had grown СКАЧАТЬ