Cleopatra Gold by William Caunitz

Author:William Caunitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504028325
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

15

A ribbon of white smoke drifted up from a camper’s morning fire on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains as a dirty pickup with dented doors sped along the road leading from the Hacienda’s airstrip, its wheels throwing up clouds of dust behind it. Sitting in the pickup’s passenger seat with his window down, Alejandro sucked in the sweet, clean country air and glanced at his driver. He had been surprised to climb out of the aircraft and not find his teacher there to greet him. Porges had always been there in the past. Was it a bad omen?

Eight and four-tenths miles outside of Charlottesville, a tongue of winding dirt road branched off I-64 and snaked through a shaded tunnel of heavy foliage until it burst into a large clearing, where a white clapboard church rested on a cinder-block foundation. Automobiles, vans, and pickups were parked haphazardly across the untended lawn. Many of them had bumper stickers that read “Keep on Truckin’ for Jesus.”

The church’s double front doors were tied open with string. All its windows were down, and the congregation was singing, clapping, and hallelujahing the glories of God.

Fiona Lee, the undercover in training known at the Hacienda as Mary Beth, wearing a floral print cotton dress and no bra, stood on the aisle of the first pew, singing and waving her arms over her head. Porges was standing next to her, frowning as he tried to deal with his student’s astonishing religious fervor.

Mary Beth had sprung her need for religion on him late Friday afternoon. They had been inside the communications training barn on the east side of the soccer field. He had just finished field-stripping a new transmitter that had been manufactured to resemble a Tampax and was worn internally by female agents. After explaining the device’s flexible power source, he had just finished with, “The pull string is the antenna,” when Mary Beth had taken the transmitter out of his hand, reassembled it, and, twirling it around by its string, announced, “I need to go to church on Sunday.”

His brows knitted together. “We have chaplains here.”

“What kind you got, Teddy?”

“Catholic, Protestant, Jewish.”

“Got any evangelical Protestants?”

“The Protestant chaplain can conduct standard Protestant services.”

“No offense, Teddy, but I’m not into generic religion, and I’m no lace-curtain Protestant. I’m a foot-stomping, fire-and-brim-stone-shoutin’, glory-to-God Protestant.”

“Mary Beth, you’ll just have to do your foot stomping here, not in town.”

Slapping the gauze-sheathed transmitter on the metal workbench, she’d announced, “I’m outta here,” and stormed off toward the barn door.

Porges had looked down at the advanced communications device and called, “Wait a minute. Let’s talk.” He’d been trying frantically to remember what the personnel guide said under the heading “Freedom of Worship.”

On Sunday morning when Porges had driven the pickup under the portico of the main house and seen her running toward him with her breasts bouncing, he’d sensed immediately that he had made a mistake in agreeing to take her to church.

Now the preacher shouted out, “Glory to God!”

Suddenly Mary Beth was sashaying out into the aisle, clapping and singing with all the others.

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