Chase Me Faster
Catherine Gale and John Steed and Emma Peel
THE AVENGERS
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by Caroline Miniscule
Chapter Two: The Plot Thickens - Page 3 II - Present Day
The alarm clock rang. Cathy opened her eyes and sat up, felt every muscle in her body give a moan of protest, groaned in sympathy and flopped back in bed. Dancing the Charleston on the wing of a biplane at sixty miles an hour certainly took it out of an old girl. She lay in bed for a few more seconds, enjoying the feeling of warmth and comfort beneath the blankets, feeling the arms of Morpheus stretching out once more to embrace her. But she was 70 years old and if time had ever been precious it was precious now. Cathy sat up again, rolled out of bed, and walked into her bathroom, sparing a slight smile for her aching muscles. Doing a wing walk had been a spectacular experience but once was definitely enough. Ten minutes in a hot shower helped to ease out the kinks. Cathy put the water on the boil, then went out into her backyard to perform her tai chi exercises while she enjoyed the sunrise. 
She read her newspaper over tea, armed with scissors, paste, and when she found an article of particular interest she clipped it out and pasted it on a sheet of paper. Not much of interest in the paper today - nothing but death and destruction everywhere around the world. As usual. The countries of Pakistan and India had learned absolutely nothing from the Cold War waged by the United States and Russia and were stockpiling nuclear weapons. It was news of that kind that made one wonder about the possibility of life in outer space. And what of the final frontier? The Americans were still investigating what had happened to the space shuttle - although obviously human error: complacency, carelessness and cost-cutting were to blame, the British-led unmanned expedition to Mars was getting ready to launch...and the Chinese were getting closer and closer to putting a man in space. Within ten years - surely within ten years - tourist flights to a space station would be common place. She would be on one of those flights, she promised herself, and on the return journey hopefully science fiction would not prove prophetic and she would find herself trapped in space while the earth roiled in a nuclear firestorm. Cathy shivered and stood up. What grim thoughts. Well, that 's what reading the newspaper did to you. She glanced at her watch. Another hour and her appointment would arrive. Miss Caroline Miniscule. Interesting name. On an interesting mission. So now, after forty years, the Department S missions were worth recording and sharing with new agents? How many lives in the last forty years could have been saved if lessons had been learned from the past. But, that was a human failing that would never be solved - the past was rarely understood and never learned from. As the classic saying was, ''It is the doom of man that they forget.'' Cathy went into her library and went to the shelf that contained her scrapbooks. It was a long shelf with a lot of scrapbooks. Cathy was not one of those that believed in not seeing a place visited until after she returned home and looked at the pictures, but she was a firm believer in documenting her experiences for future use. Many articles and even a book or two had come to fruition through a germ from her scrapbooks. Had she done anything with her adventures - forty years ago? That was two years in her life that had passed incredibly quickly. A time when she had faced death time after time and had never felt more alive. And Steed. John Steed. What an extraordinary man. A little smile played around Cathy's lips. She hadn't thought about him in years. It would be...fun, to think about him again. She paused, then looking along the spines of a series of photograph albums labeled birds, she took down two, labeled 1963 and 1964. They contained photographs that she had taken (and developed - one of her skills honed over a lifetime). She turned over the pages carefully, and with each bird she saw it rekindled a memory of a journey taken. She came across photos of three different kinds of woodpeckers. Yes...she remembered that trip. And her return, when she'd spent a couple of hours developing the photos and John Steed had stopped by and looked at the three photos. ''You've been gone for a fortnight,'' he had commented, ''and this is all you have to show for it?'' She'd pointed out that the birds didn't stop and pose for her, and he'd come back with the comment that he'd never had that problem. And after that he'd gotten her involved in the Litoff mystery. Cathy laughed. She wondered if Caroline Miniscule would enjoy wading through two scrapbooks worth of bird photographs while she told of all the memories that they brought back to her. It would probably not be quite what she - or Morris Drummond - had envisioned. She left the scrapbooks on the coffee table. Caroline Miniscule would be in for a treat. At precisely nine o'clock a.m. there came a knock on her front door. Punctual to the dot. Cathy liked that. She opened the door to a tall, slender, woman in her thirties - a woman with blonde hair cut in an attractive bob and very pale, almost Siberian husky blue, eyes. She wore a charcoal gray pants suit and carried a briefcase. ''Mrs. Gale?'' she said with a smile. ''My name is Caroline Miniscule. I'm from....Morris Drummond.'' Cathy smiled, and stepped back. ''I've been expecting you. Please come in.'' The woman who called herself Caroline Miniscule smiled and walked into Catherine Gale's house. |
| Chapter 3 to be uploaded June 15, 2003 |   
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