As he strolled through the crisp autumn air, admiring the lights of the city around him, Paul Metcalfe concluded that occasionally there were some nice perks to the job.
Today had been his least favourite kind of mission: body guard duty. He, Adam and Rick had been dispatched to Paris for the World Economic Advisory Council summit. Spectrum’s presence had been a last minute request to reassure the more nervous members.
The delegates’ fear was understandable - conferences and meetings like this were amongst the Mysterons’ favourite targets - but as far as the three captains were concerned, being cooped up in an auditorium for five hours without an actual, active threat was fairly pointless. ‘A waste of time’ was probably the most polite way to describe how they felt about the hand-holding exercise that this promised to be, and the language they wanted to use deteriorated from there.
Thankfully the Colonel found a way to make the mission bearable. In the briefing he’d noted that between their hours already spent on-duty, the timings of their flights, time zones, the duration of the forum and that they’d have to fly themselves because he (somehow) couldn’t spare an Angel to drop them off and collect them afterwards, it was regrettably going to put them over their flight hours. White, with a completely straight face, then explained how he understood it was a terrible inconvenience, but due to the short notice of it all, they would have to spend the night in Paris at the very nice apartment that Spectrum maintained for VIP visitors to the local office. Oh, and for absolutely inexplicable reasons, their flight home wouldn’t be until eleven am, local time.
Just as straight faced they’d chorused how they all understood completely. It was of course unavoidable and unfortunate, they’d just have to grin and bear it and make it work.
As soon as the extremely uneventful conference was over and the delegates were handed back to the care of their personal security teams, the three of them made a beeline to the apartment, threw on their civvies and promptly scattered, intent on making as much use of the late afternoon as they could. They’d made plans to meet at a café near the Louvre for a late night drink (non-alcoholic for Adam since he’d drawn the short straw and would be flying them back) before they turned in for the night.
“If I could have brought Dianne, this would have been perfect,” Paul mused to himself as he paused to lean on the railing of the Pont des Arts, watching the lights glittering on the calm surface of the Seine River. A check of his watch showed the time and he straightened up. “Better get a move on, it’s almost time to meet at Café Mollien.” Paul tucked his hands into his jacket pockets for warmth and continued his stroll, crossing the bridge and turning left towards the Quai François Mitterrand. He passed a few knots and clumps of people as he walked alongside the road; groups of friends, lovers walking hand in hand and the odd local headed home after work. He’d just spotted Rick and Adam waiting for him up ahead when a shriek split the air, coming from down beside the water’s edge.
Il y a une fille dans la rivière! S’il vous plait! Aidez-la!”
Scarlet looked over the edge of the stone wall to see a panicked woman in a long dress, standing beside the river’s edge and pointing to a dark shape in the water. A glance told him that Rick and Adam had heard her too and were already running over. Moving quickly, Scarlet vaulted the wall and dropped onto the ramp leading from the road down to the river’s edge, jumped the second wall, threw off his jacket and plunged into the freezing water. A few strokes let him grab the limp form and he towed her back to the bank.
“Here, I’ve got her!” Adam leaned down and manhandled the limp woman out of the water. Rick was there a split second later and helped Paul get out of the river, and to the surprise of all three men, the young woman coughed, vomited out an astonishing amount of water and started to cry. Another passerby had already called for an ambulance, someone else came running up with a picnic blanket that the girl was wrapped in, and in the confusion the three of them managed to absent themselves from the scene without too much fuss.
“Let’s get back before someone notices we left,” Adam suggested as he held Paul’s jacket out to him. “The apartment isn’t too far.”
“S.I.G.” Paul wrung some of the water out of his shirt before he accepted the jacket and pulled it on. He was already shivering, but that subsided as they briskly walked away from the area. As he reviewed what had happened while they walked, a thought occurred to him and he asked “Did either of you see where that woman got to? The one who called for help?”
“No, did you?” Rick asked as he glanced about in case she was also hurrying away from the scene.
“No. Adam?” Paul looked at his friend.
“No.” Adam frowned. “She looked familiar though, but I just can’t place her.”
“I thought I recognised her too.” Paul also frowned.
“Me three. This is weird. A random woman in Paris that we all recognise but we can’t name her. I don’t like it.” Rick rubbed his chin in thought as they walked. “I don’t know about you two, but I can’t draw faces at all. When we get back to base, let’s do an Identikit composite photo and run it through the computer, that might put a name to her.”
“Agreed.” Adam nodded. “C’mon, the apartment’s just around the corner, let’s get inside before anything else can happen.”
0o0o0
The rest of the night passed without incident, and the next day all three of them were quietly pleased to see a couple of inches in the morning paper about a woman rescued from the Seine by three unknown men.
According to the paper, she’d ended up in the water at the Pont de Sully, falling in after sitting on the edge of the bridge and getting shoved from behind by a drunken group of rowdy men on their way to a dance club. Between the surprise, the cold and the power of the water, she’d been unable to swim to the edge and had been at the point of drowning when she was saved.
Knowing that she was going to be okay was the perfect cap off to their trip.
Due to travel time and the vagaries of timezones, it was nearly dinner time on base when they landed. After stowing their things, reporting back to the Colonel and filing the necessary reports, they reconvened in the commissary, camping out at their usual table and picking at their food as they worked together on the tablet that Rick brought from his room.
“Her face was more round than oval, and a smaller chin,” was Scarlet’s comment as he reviewed their latest efforts.
“That’s more like it.” Blue nodded in approval once Ochre made the change and showed them the result. “What was her hair like? I don’t remember.”
“Maybe brown?” Ochre ventured, looking between the other two and the screen. “I’m not sure, it was pretty dark down by the water, but I know it was straight, parted down the middle. I think I’ve got the smile right though, I remember it was very Mona Lisa.”
“What are you doing?”
They looked up to see Fawn standing beside them, dinner tray in hand and curiosity written all over his face.
“We’re trying to figure out who the woman was who called for help for the girl in the river,” Scarlet explained, glancing up at him. “We all recognise her, but none of us could place her, so we’re doing an Identikit.” A poke from him to Ochre, and the other officer turned the screen so Fawn could see it.
“Huh.” Fawn studied the picture for a long moment. “You were in Paris, right?” His eyes didn’t leave the image.
“Yeah,” Rick answered absently as he scrolled through different hairstyles, trying to find one that matched what he remembered.
“Whereabouts?”
“By the Louvre.”
“Near the Quai François Mitterrand?” Fawn asked, stumbling a little over the pronunciation.
“Yes, how did you know?” Adam looked up, surprised that Fawn knew the spot. They hadn’t talked with anyone yet about the details of what had happened, just that it had happened and the standard report to the Colonel that everyone had to make if anything odd or unusual happened on leave.
“I think I know who it is, and I’m not surprised that you recognise her, you’ve kissed her several times. In fact all four of us have. Wait here.” Fawn set down his tray and hurried off, leaving the three bewildered officers wondering what on earth he was going on about.
A few minutes later he was back with something under his arm. To their surprise it was one of the CPR training manikins - and to their shock, the manikin’s face matched the one on their screen. “She’s ‘The Unknown Woman of the Seine’,” Fawn explained as he sat the dummy on a spare chair. “According to the legends, she was pulled out of the river, drowned, close to what was the Quai du Louvre somewhere around 1880, it got renamed to Quai François Mitterrand later on. A death mask was made of her face because of the expression she had, people liked it and bought copies of it, and in the 1950s it was used to make the face for the first CPR training manikin.”
“...Are you saying she is the woman we saw at the river?” Adam looked at the other three men, his eyes wide. “She can’t be.”
“She did vanish though…” Rick commented, looking understandably spooked.
“And her dress, I remember it being antique-looking.” Scarlet frowned, looked down as he gathered his thoughts, then looked up at the rest of the group. “There’s more in heaven and earth, Horatio…” he trailed off, unwilling to state the impossible.
“Well, ghost, angel, or someone who was out for a fancy dress party, that young woman is alive because of her,” Fawn declared as he picked up the manikin, “and that’s what matters most.”