August 25, 1998

Today was the first briefing with Mitch Barnes, the senior officer in charge of this op. Our make shift head headquarters is in the basement of a local doctor's office. Barnes when over the mission basics and new some intel from Langley and it was surprisingly quick.
When I got back to the apartment I found that my clothes had come from the CIA wardrobe department. The light blue button down wasn't so bad, but when I saw the brown corduroys and matching sweater vest that went with it I quickly added shopping to my to do list for the day. After a little looking I managed to find some stuff that I thought believable for a teacher to wear, but I could still use at home once the mission was over.
Next I had to a meeting a the high school I'll be working at. Called South Glen South. It was probably the most boring experience of my life, and that is including all of the seminars I ever attended for the CIA.

August 26, 1998

I got up this morning and was taking a shower as usual, when it suddenly hit me that I would be teaching today. Snoring through one staff meeting was one thing, but actually getting up in front of twenty five to thirty kids and pretending to know something about English was a whole different story. That's right a 29 year old CIA field agent was nervous about his first day of school. I could practically hear Eric laughing at me.
It went alright though. I started out by trying to go over what the course was about like Lieutenant Dugan had advised, noticed that half of them were asleep after 10 minutes of it, gave up and decided to have everyone introduce themselves instead. Thinking that maybe having other people stand up and talk would take some of the pressure off me. It seemed to work after a while. I bugged the first few people until managing pry a couple humorous comments out of them, then the atmosphere seemed to get a little less awkward. It was a big relief.

September 1, 1998

First week as a teacher went okay, although I still feel awkward getting up in front of a bunch of seventeen year olds everyday and talking about symbolism in Lord of the Flies. Tonight Courtney and I are going to this club downtown to do some surveillance on a guy named Dunnigan Lawrence. Lawrence is a rumored dealer of illegal weapons. Prime candidate to have ties with SD-8.

September 16, 1998

Courtney just got back from L.A., not surprisingly we've been ordered to get off Lawrence and move on. After two weeks of round the clock surveillance on Lawrence, some of which were done by me and Courtney on fake dates, we turned up pretty much nothing. I suppose it was expecting too much to want to get something solid on SD-8 this quickly. Devlin even said it would take at least a year. It's still disappointing though.
In other news I think I'm getting the hang of this teaching thing. After trying for a few weeks to act like a combination of some of the teachers I had and what they taught in training I eventually gave up. It became apparent to me that simply playing the role like an actor would not work when this one kid, Pete, made a sarcastic comment while I was talking about formality in writing. I don't remember what his exact words were, but it was something about why I didn't let them call me by my first name. Thinking about this I really didn't have a good answer. After all I didn't know many teenagers before this mission; except my cousin and the guy who walks Donovan when I'm out of town, and both of them always called me Mike. After about a minute I figured that I'd start to look pretty stupid just standing there saying nothing, so I told them that if they were really dying to call me by my first name I didn't care. It's not technically a lie.

November 19, 1998

Finally! After a month and a half of dead ends we may have found something useful. Agent Daschle who is working inside the local police department spotted a well known agent of SD-6, named Marc Myrick, in some surveillance photos from a bomb in a train station. Our double in SD-6, Jack Bristow, confirmed the ID on Myrick. If we find Myrick, then we're that much closer to finding SD-8.

November 27, 1998

Courtney and I decided to have Thanksgiving dinner together at her place, none of us could really go home this year and it was okay for our cover personalities to know each other. We had a good time, Courtney's actually a really fun person. I stayed for the night on her couch since Sam Coulson and Laura Anastassakis are suppose to be a couple who has been together for a while. She took me by surprise when she presented me with a wrapped package. Apparently a few agents pitched in to get me tickets to a Chicago Blackhawks game in February.
She told me, "You're lucky. We even managed to get 'em for the game against the Kings."
I was really touched. It was probably Eric's idea that's the only way I can figured that they would a) know that today was my birthday and b) know I liked the Kings. I officially take back anything I ever said about him being a pain in the ass.