This story is part 5 of the Seven Habits Series but can be read stand alone. It is set in St. Louis between Seasons 2 and 3. When we last left off the Nathan James knows that they need to get a special chemical stock from a pharmaceutical plant in Albuquerque. Unfortunately, that part of the US has been taken over by the Mexicali Federation. Tex has commandeered Kat's mother's computer so she's been helping with Ray's orphan group and Kara's office to keep herself busy. Debbie Foster called on an old friend of Danny's to bring her to St. Louis to be with her daughter. Michener knows that they need to act fast to regain control of the country but someone is also sending mysterious messages about his location to an unknown agent. Now you know all the major events in Be Proactive, Put First Things First, Begin With the End in Mind, and Synergize. I hope you'll enjoy this segment.

**Always Keep a Diamond in Your Mind, Solomon Burk**

Tex pulled out the laptop and set it on the hotel desk. While it booted he checked his watch. It wouldn't do for Kat to come home from whatever it was that she did until 1 AM every night and find him on the computer she wished she could use. He had asked Val if she could hook the kid up with a computer of her own and she was supposed to be getting back to him on that. Ever since he'd been back she seemed a little less enthusiastic about his interference in her life. He supposed it was to be expected. At this age, what teenage girl wanted to hang out with her dad?

The blue screen popped up and he slipped the tiny key card into place. A few seconds later he was able to log in to the secure side of the computer. As much as he'd wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, he hadn't been able to stay away from Claire's notes. He'd spent pretty much all his downtime during the long trip through the midwest reading them. She'd encrypted them, but he figured out the key on the second try. That's what happened when your life had been entwined with someone else's for nearly twenty years.

He'd known she managed an ever changing group of agents, 5 to 10 at a time. But, other than one man he'd worked with in Jordan about five years ago, he'd never known who they were. Everything was tracked by code name and he could not find a single piece of identifying information about himself or any other agent. If his wife had been good at anything, it was keeping secrets. Her notes were meticulous including dates, times, and locations. Every email was retained and every phone call logged with a description of the content. Every op had a folder containing reports from her people and her report going up the chain. He found it fascinating to read her reports on his work and see what she'd concealed, embellished, or even outright altered.

At the same time as it fascinated him, reading her words had given him dreams of her again. In his dreams, she typed the messages at the beat up butcher block table she had made him buy at the Sante Fe flea market when they went there for a vacation in 1986. Back then her hair had been raven's black, but he wondered if in the last few years a little silver might have crept into her temples. Either way, she would have been wearing one of the long skirts she favored with a t-shirt. The logo would surely have extorted one to Save the Eelgrass or Give Life or something similar. In her writing he could hear the low tone of her voice and the unique rhythms to her speech that gave away the fact that even though she did not have an accent, English was not her first language. He'd tried his best not to get too hung up on the fact that she had moved on from him, but hearing her voice so clearly had made him ache for her again. Etza'a had played a cruel joke on him, allowing him the joy of living and finding his daughter while taking his lovely Claire away.

They had been in the car, on a long dark highway somewhere in Illinois when he found that she had sent a final listing of all the agents she'd ever managed to her boss in early October. It was her last recorded activity in the set of files he was looking at, although not the last item to be opened and read on the secure partition of the drive. By October, Tex had been on the Nathan James for almost a month. There were two details about the letter that struck him. First, she listed all her agents by codename, last known location, status, and date of status confirmation. Of the eight not already dead or transferred to other roles before the flu hit, four were listed as confirmed dead in the middle east in July and August, one was dead in China, and one was dead in the Philippines. Two were listed as unknown and Tex immediately recognized one of the listings as the man he'd worked with before, agent KS87EF, which was interesting because he knew for a fact that the man's family thought he had died while on a mission in the middle east.

What struck him as surprising was that the confirmation date for his own status was listed as exactly the date the Nathan James had made port in Cuba, which had been a few weeks after the last time he'd contacted her. The second thing was that unlike every other correspondence in her records, this one appeared to have a typo. Her boss went by the code name DGPacManNOO. Indeed, it had been the fall back code he had memorized nearly ten years ago in case he lost contact with his handler and needed to make contact up the chain. However, on this single copied email she had corrected the address to DGPacManN00. The difference was minuscule but suddenly names and titles flitted through Tex's head and he knew for certain who had been employing him for the last 10 years. The information left him in a bit of a moral quandary because he could think of more than one person whom he had interacted with since the Red Flu began who would like this bit of information.

Now, nearly a week later, he'd decided what he needed to do next. He slipped the tiny comm card into the laptop and logged into the secure network. He opened a message window and typed his usual update on the President's location. Then he typed in the code words he was going to use and let the encryption program both code and encrypt the message.

While that ran, he crafted a second message. He had thought of many things he wanted to ask the man who had sent him on countless missions all over the world. First and foremost was "Whose side are we on?" But given the state of the world these days, that was likely an even murkier question then it had been before the Flu. And he'd like to know where the man was. The area he had been in before the flu was now claimed by the MCF. How was it that he had survived, and disappeared? But that information wouldn't help him either. "Is Michener legitimate?" was pointless too, even though Tex was dying to know the answer. His git told him to back Michener so that's what he would do, regardless of what the bossman said. Right now, he was doing everything he could to help see the cure distributed and he would keep doing that unless another threat presented itself. So finally, he typed the words, dreading the answer. "Is there anyone I should inform of your survival?"

That answer came almost three days later. "No"

Tex scratched his beard. That wasn't what he'd expected. He had figured Michener should know and potentially Chandler. And certainly a few others had a right to know. But he had to follow orders so he would keep it to himself, at least for the time being.