Sister Wouden and Sister Pope, dressed in identical ankle-length navy blue coats, spot me from about 20 yards away and look like they have been waiting for me all their lives.
"Hi! Would you like a tour? It will only take about 20 minutes."
In truth, I do not want a tour of the 10-acre concrete plot that is the heart of the Mormon Temple in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, and I seriously doubt it will take 20 minutes. I am here to do a story on the Olympic scandal; allegations that the city won the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, worth $1.5 billion, by lavishing gifts and prostitutes and first-class air fares and mucho cash on International Olympic Committee officials.
Not the sort of things a couple of child missionaries would be of much help with.
But Sister Wouden, all 25 years or so of her, is tethered to a portable oxygen tank that she lugs behind her. A clear plastic tube feeds air through her nostrils, and the audible sound of her breathing indicates the act itself is not undertaken without strain. Sister Pope, healthy and red-cheeked by contrast and about the same age, seems to hold her own breath in empathy, waiting for an answer.
Oh, all right. When I agree to the tour, Sister Pope clasps her hands together in apparent gratitude and Sister Wouden rasps a squeal. In the next hour, I will learn something about determination and zealotry and single-mindedness as these two women confidently tell me all about God and His Purpose for our lives.
Absolute certainty of intent has been a feature of Utah ever since a a man named Brigham Young headed west from Illinois in winter 1847 to find a place to settle 14,000 Mormons fleeing religious persecution. With an advance party of 72 covered horse and mule-drawn wagons, Young arrived in the Wasatch Valley, Utah, looked down over what is now Salt Lake City, drove his cane into the ground and proclaimed: "This is the place."
From the beginning the sect, (officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) eventually grew to 2.8 million members worldwide. It was always an outcast from mainstream Christianity. Although Mormons believe in the Bible, they also believe in the Book of Mormon, a book that their first prophet, Joseph Smith, believed was another biblical testament revealed to him in 1823. Early church teachings condoned polygamy and sponsored secret rituals for honouring the dead, none of which seemed kosher to most Christians.
Except for polygamy - eventually outlawed by the Mormon Church (even though some 20,000 excommunicated members still practice it illegally in Utah) - things have changed little for most Mormons since then. Except that now, and for most of this century, Mormons have controlled the state of Utah. Some 70 per cent of its 2 million population is Mormon. Half of Salt Lake City's 180,000 residents are Mormon. They are even more heavily represented in the power structure: of 104 state legislators, 89 are Mormon.
Their influence (and that word can be used with only a nod to understatement), is everywhere. Bookstores feature aisles and aisles of church publications. Local television stations carry warnings about programmes "with adult content" that are seen everywhere else in the US, and some shows are banned altogether.
The religion opposes all alcohol and tobacco. In practical terms, that means one needs a brochure to understand the liquor laws in Utah. For example, one cannot go to a bar and order a drink. Liquor can only be had in a restaurant when ordered with food. Even then, only one drink at a time can be served; no aperitif and wine, followed by a port, for example. Also, no double shot of whiskey; only a single.
To get around this, bars are called private clubs, meaning that a "temporary membership card" must be purchased at the door for a few dollars.
All of which is to make the unstartling point that in Utah, it is Mormons who run the show. It was Mormons - zealous, Godfearing Mormons, whose devotion to industry is such that the state symbol is the beehive - who campaigned for 10 years to bring the Winter Olympics to their state. And it is here, in a city encircled by snow-capped mountains and infused with piety, that the largest Olympic scandal in history is destined to change, and perhaps taint for ever, the image of the Games.
One can sympathise with Utah's Mormon Governor, Michael Leavitt, who in calling for "healing" declared the corruption of the Olympics did not start in Salt Lake City. He hoped, however, it would end here. Still, the accumulation of evidence and the pace of disclosures about what the Salt Lake Organising Committee (SLOC) did to win the Olympics are startling. When it meets this weekend in Lausanne, Switzerland, to ascertain the conduct of its own 115 members, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will consider the following:
Salt Lake organisers paid for school tuitions for 13 relatives of IOC members, totalling about $400,000 (£272,000).
IOC member Jean-Claude Ganga of the Republic of Congo was given $100,000 and three months free medical treatment for hepatitis. He also made $60,000 on a land deal arranged by a Salt Lake businessman.
Other IOC members received knee-joint replacement therapy and plastic surgery from the Intermountain Health Care company of Utah.
IOC vice-president Dick Pound, who heads the IOC investigation, said in New York this week that so far it appeared many IOC members received cash or gifts from Salt Lake organisers that came to more than $100,000 each. IOC rules dictate that gifts must not exceed $150.
IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who is not under the $150 edict because he himself does not vote on bid cities, received gifts of firearms from Salt Lake organisers.
That is just the beginning. While the gifts from Salt Lake organisers appear to be worth at least $1 million, the real Pandora's box is the history of the modern Olympics.
Representatives from other cities, which won previous Olympic bids, such as Nagano in Japan, and Atlanta, Georgia, are now describing the gifts they were asked to give IOC members. Geishas and expensive artwork in Japan, jobs to relatives, even the payment of an apartment and a job for the husband of IOC member Pirjo Haeggman from Finland during the Montreal bid.
The zealousness of Salt Lake organisers has unearthed a history of corruption that many observers suspect stretches back to the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the first in modern history so commercialised that they proved profitable, bringing the city $225 million and triggering a subsequent frenzy by cities around the world to host the Games.
Mr Samaranch, a 78-year-old Spanish marquis, promises to root out corruption, but yesterday there were calls for Samaranch to quit. Two IOC members caught up in the Salt Lake City allegations, Bashir Mohamed Attarabulsi of Libya and Pirjo Haggman, have already resigned. Attarabulsi resigned personally to Samaranch yesterday.
Critics contend that Samaranch, who has headed the IOC since 1980, has created an elite culture wherein members expect to be wined and dined and wooed. During the 1998 Nagano Japan Games, for instance, Samaranch, a Catholic, wanted a private Mass held on Sundays. Nagano officials flew in a Catholic priest 500 miles from Tokyo every week.
Nagano beat Salt Lake City by just four votes in the bid for the 1998 Games. The Mormons were not about to lose again. They would do whatever was necessary. This time, in June 1995, Salt Lake won 54 of the 89 votes cast.
Now, in addition to the IOC investigation of itself, almost every federal US agency is conducting its own Olympics inquiry, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the Customs Service and the Internal Revenue Service. There are other inquiries, and the IOC is trying to spin the matter into a question of "ethics" instead of "criminal conduct". Whether the Games will even be held in Salt Lake is up for discussion.
In Salt Lake City, in aggressively seeking to win the Olympics, it is clear that Mormons sought to leave behind the safety of their created world to play in the real world, using its rules of commerce and negotiation.
What is real and acceptable and right can be confusing, anywhere.
Back on the tour, as we view the Mormon Tabernacle, home of the famous organ with 11,623 pipes and the 325-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Sister Pope and a tired Sister Wouden explain the construction of the 6,000-seat domed building. The pillars are pine, painted convincingly to look like marble. The pews are pine, painted to look like oak. Even the organ's pipes are wood, painted metallic to look like gold. Nothing in this God's house, in other words, is what it seems.
Departing from a discussion about God's purpose for our lives, I ask them about the Olympics coming to Salt Lake City. "Oh, isn't it wonderful! It will be so exciting," Sister Pope says. "Will you fill out a card so we can send you a Book of Mormon?"
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