A Certain Secret Someone

I.

Brandt loves fashion. While the rest of the team spend their free time in the hotel, with a bottle of whiskey, talking about their dream lives if they just could do anything and didn’t have this strange addiction to their current careers. Jane would be an architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ethan a large animal veterinarian (such as James Herriot), and Benji thinks they’re all crazy for acting like they don’t enjoy playing James Bond and says “Hell, I’d still do this.”  They all are silent for a moment for a moment after that, and they turn to look at where Brandt lies on the bed, expectant, hopeful, maybe wanting to hear him talk about how he wishes he had never left the Army.  

He flips to another glossy page in his magazine instead; Valentino’s spring collection looks more promising than this discussion. He isn’t going to be able to change his job, but the wardrobe he has is starting to get a little bit 2009. No one wears Armani’s dress shirts anymore, because the collars get a funny bend to them quickly in their line of work, and Ethan pops the top button off of the ones he borrows regularly.  Brandt is not really a big fan of the soft pastel pinstripes worked into the weaving (Sorry, Tim Gunn), but he loves the inside pattern on the jacket. Women shouldn’t monopolize interesting lining.

None of the team really makes anything of how many copies of GQ and Vogue Brandt keeps around, and Benji  decided to be a good person for his New Year’s resolutions, and so doesn’t ask him about all the fashionista twitters he follows. There’s something else he’s not going to ask him about because, Field Agent or Chief Analyst, his obsession with shoes seems to rival Jane’s lust for bigger guns. It’s boarding on fetish, and Benji hates him a little bit after spending forty-five minutes looking at designer loafers in Prague. (They’re made of baby animals, and somehow, that doesn’t endear them to the man.)

It all comes in handy in the end, because for all the fashion magazines, designer websites, and alterations he’d paid attention to, he is the only person who notices that their target is not who they think he is, because he is wearing the wrong sort of suit. Armando Molinelli has an odd habit of wearing Chanel’s designs for men, and that tendency catches Brandt’s eye. A man who loved such an androgynous cut to his suit would never be caught dead in a cookie cutter style plain black suit, but even less likely was the Zara double breasted monstrosity that his doppelganger was wearing.

No one ever teases Brandt about watching runway shows after that.