Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
Welcome to America, Mr. Brand
Now that Billy knew that she knew that he knew that something was up between Lee and Amanda, his attempts at forcing Lee to make a move had become increasingly, sometimes painfully, obvious.
He started sending Amanda out, alone, on routine background checks and "babysitting" assignments. All of her assignments fit the following criteria: single, and male. Their ages differed wildly, as did their professions.
At first, it wasn't so bad. He sent her off as an escort to the Swedish embassy with a good-looking but diffident young agent, a new hire from Wisconsin.
But then Billy made his first real mistake. He practically shoehorned Amanda into taking a tour of D.C. with a sleazy Interpol agent. The second she got back, Lee went into paroxysms of anger when he found out that the man had had difficulty keeping his hands to himself. The Interpol agent was promptly christened "the Octopus". The incident led to Lee promising Amanda that she would not have to deal with any more grabbers. (How Lee intended to fulfill that promise was anyone's guess.)
Billy, after learning — to his chagrin — that while Lee did not care to declare his intentions about Amanda outright, he did not appreciate others doing so either, decided to try one more time. He sent Lee to tell her that she needed to manage and supervise a small and bumbling British accountant on vacation.
Francine had to wonder if Amanda's assignment was better or worse than her own. Was it better to corral a klutzy oddball accountant with James Bond fantasies, or spend a full week making stultifying small talk with a sexagenarian Assistant Secretary of Industrial Mobilization from Tasmania?
Honestly, she didn't know where the UN found these people. Nor did she know why Mr. Assistant Secretary of Industrial Mobilization from Tasmania was considered a UN VIP.
Lee, as usual, got the really enviable job. He was assigned to the seventh Earl of Twickensham, Kenneth Clayton-Dobbs. The earl was everything the Assistant Secretary of Industrial Mobilization from Tasmania was not: young, charming, easy on the eyes, capable of holding up his side of the conversation, and obviously rich.
He's just an accountant. What could he possibly do to mess things up?
It's only a garden party. What could go wrong?
It's only…
He's just…
Nothing, nothing, was "only" or "just" or "simple" when Amanda got involved, so Francine was unsurprised when they found themselves smack-dab in the middle of some massive conspiracy involving the swoon-worthy Earl of Twickensham, the equally unswoon-worthy Mr. James Brand, and an attempt to utterly incapacitate most of the US money supply for the foreseeable future.
Despite the fact that it had all the marks of a thrilling adventure, it had, in Francine's mind, been a singularly uninteresting case. She would normally think that "a massive conspiracy" and "a singularly uninteresting case" wouldn't go together. But that was without accounting for the efforts of Mr. Brand. They could have solved the case much more simply without him, but unfortunately Amanda liked the clumsy little detective-wannabe, and Lee liked Amanda.
She sighed, and hoped that Billy wouldn't send Amanda on any more reconnaissance or escort missions for any more men. It simply wasn't worth the trouble.