Time Sealers

Sweat burns Peter Moss' eyes as he sprints the last few steps to the top of the hill and begins the final leg of his ten-mile morning run through the park. At this hour, 5:30 A.M., the park and the town are eerily quiet. This is the beauty of running so early in the morning; no one is around to disturb the exquisite peacefulness of the park. Peter smiles as he puts on a burst of speed for the last few hundred yards of the trail leading back to his house, tucked amongst the trees, just a few yards from the park. As he slows, Peter thinks of the turmoil he will be creating in a few hours for a group of men and the company they work for.

Peter never wanted to be an undercover agent nor did he ever think about it. He was working in his last semester on his Ph.D. in computer science when he stumbled across a massive fraud the Dean of the Finance Department was committing. Peter had been assigned to a small program that matched his Ph.D. thesis to help gather the data, information and everything he needed. When the program assigned to him continually came back with wrong answers, Peter wrote his own program to do the work. That was when he discovered one-tenth of one percent of each dollar coming from the military for research was being diverted to a special account know only to the Dean of Finance. The fraud lasted nineteen years before being detected by Peter's program. One month after turning over his program and a written report to the President of the University, the Deputy Director of the agency he now worked for visited Peter.

Peter and some of his team had celebrated his tenth year with the agency just last month. He had enjoyed those ten years; he had been allowed to pick his own team for each assignment during the last three of them. He was also allowed to work the jobs any way he felt would be the best approach to get a conviction or confession. The asignment he was currently on was a bad one.

The assignment was at a large company working as a contractor for the General Electric (GE) Company. While dealing with GE, the company was stealing and selling any secrets it came across to the highest bidding foreign government. Peter's team found proff the company had already sold blueprints of a centrifuge machine, which was part of the process of making material for atomic weapons. The meeting was to be at ten o'clock today to confront the individuals and to extract a confession before arresting the guilty parties.

After working with and around some of the men involved for the last three months, Peter knew, and so did his men, which of the individuals to start with. Once they broke them and extracted confessions, it would be easier to lay the report before the big fish and watch fingers being pointed at every one else but themselves. When this started, the game would be over and most of them would be going to prison for a very long time.