Chapter 42 -Traitors Within
The sudden departure of the goblins from the briefing left Sir Isaac Umber besieged by the onslaught of information hungry reporters.
"What evidence do you have, Sir Isaac?"
"I'm not at liberty to say until after the investigation."
He would definitely have less liberty dead.
"Mr. Umber, before today Lestrange's assets have never been frozen despite being a known Death Eater. The Ministry has been trying to make the goblins do that for years and failed. How did you convince the goblins to do it?"
He smiled and replied with a glint in his eye, "Goblins are free beings and their decisions are without external influence. I merely pointed out that whoever it was who robbed Gringotts had to know it was not to be tolerated."
And the goblins actually considered it?
"Do you think the Death Eaters will attack Gringotts?"
"I think Mrs. Lestrange is reasonable. She runs a business; she needs money to do that, it will not benefit her to take down our banking institution that has protected her interests for so long."
Honor and respect among fellow thieves.
"Will she kill or negotiate?"
"It's hard to speculate and I wouldn't want to second guess such a brilliant mind."
Both. Definitely both.
"Why are you risking your life by implicating the Death Eaters and giving Gringotts evidence against Lestrange?"
"I did not have much of a choice. I was going to be charged with a crime I did not commit. I have my name and my family's reputation to protect."
After his answer, he begged off other questions and made his way out to the lobby. Some reporters continued to hound him until he Disapparated just outside the bank.
Ginny stayed back, thinking about the briefing and his interview earlier that day. She had listened to and observed him during his exchange with reporters. Umber knew exactly what he was doing, he knew exactly what he would tell the goblins during the interrogation and he got his wish - Bellatrix Lestrange with murder in her eyes. This was personal and Lestrange would make sure he would suffer a long and painful death.
She went through random thoughts about the robbery...Lestrange was retiring...needs money to finance retirement party...robs Gringotts...possible Bruin framed for crime...Bruin fights back to rain on Lestrange's retirement parade?
The question that still begged to be answered was why would Lestrange want Umber to take the fall for Gringotts? She obviously thought the goblins would sentence him and that she would get away with it. But it was not like her to do something cowardly like steal and then not take the credit for it, even if it meant she was taking from the goblins. And she looked but did not find any other connection between Lestrange and Umber. What would it gain Umber to risk his life to get Lestrange in trouble with the goblins?
I have my name and my family's reputation to protect.
Ginny didn't notice until then that her heart was pounding harder. That was what the anti-potion Bruins pledged to do. Farfetched but not totally impossible.
Was Lestrange a threat to what the Bruins were trying to protect?
She was too close to this and needed an objective pair of eyes to tell her if she was overreaching. She thought about calling Hermione to run it by her. That and she was curious how things were going with Harry.
As soon as she got out onto Diagon Alley, she took out her mobile phone but before she could place a call saw that there was a message on it. She listened, couldn't help by break into a smile as she heard Hermione's concerned voice. It was good that she thought things were bad...nowadays it was the law of opposites with her. But what the heck were they doing in an art gallery? And did she say Bruins or Ruins?
She called her. It rang...and it rang...
As Ginny waited patiently for Hermione's voicemail to pick up, she glanced at the giant time teller above the Gringotts entrance. It was a good thing the Umber proceedings ended earlier than expected. She had some time. She wanted to drop by Hogwarts to attend a funeral; a house elf's.
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Sometime just before that, at a magical potions lab somewhere north of Toronto, Harry was trying his best to stay awake. It seemed that the two days of sleep deprivation had finally taken its toll. It did not help that he was by himself in a cozy, warm observation booth listening to piped in elevator music and was relegated to being a spectator as Hermione did all the work inside the Level 5 lab. He tried to convince her that he could help but she refused, telling him she needed him to stay outside just in case something bad happened and she couldn't leave the lab on her own.
Was he worried about her safety? Yes. But when she told him she needed a Level 5 lab and was going to take the potion apart he knew it would be dangerous. As much as he was concerned, she was the best person to do it and he understood why she wanted to do this on her own.
Professor Tan had left them at his own private lab some time ago. He did not trust the Professor at all and neither did Hermione but they, in the interest of a nearing deadline, decided to press on and just be on the watch. He had scanned their perimeter and aside from a Muggle movie recorder he found running from within the room he was in, there had been no further attempts to spy on them.
It took a while for Hermione to set up the Professor's lab the way she wanted it set up and he took the opportunity to put in a call to Kingsley. Harry filled him in about the events in the last couple of days, Floyd, the disruption that seemed to be planned at the research conference, and what Hermione was attempting to do. It was good that Kingsley knew about his history with Floyd and the elusive purple potion.
He fought against indignation to rub it in Kingsley's face that he had been right all along. For one, Kingsley had admitted that the MLE from both Toronto and London dropped the ball on this and had an almost apologetic tone throughout their conversation. There was also the fact that there was nothing to gain by not working with him. Kingsley shared with him ongoing events in London that potentially were related to the events in Toronto. There were low level crimes highly suggestive of Squib and Muggle use of a magic enabling potion, a recent interrogation confirming one such concoction was going around under the street name Vitamin Squib X or Vitamin X. There was also word out that Lestrange and the Death Eaters did not want anyone touching or using it, and those who had were made examples of. To add to that, Argus Filch had just been found dead; suffocating as he was forced to ingest a list of his Hogwarts rules. Losing a witness put a considerable damper on their Gringotts robbery investigation, which also pointed strongly to Lestrange.
Kingsley would know more when they met in about an hour and in the meantime, he suggested they avoid MLE contact until their meeting. He was clear; as a leader in the Order he was behind them but as the London Head Auror he would be hard-pressed to justify what they were currently attempting to do. Aside from Andy, who had already contacted him a few minutes earlier and was on her way to meet him, Harry had every intention to stay away from Toronto law enforcement.
Harry barely had time to think about his conversation with Kingsley when Hermione's phone started ringing. She had left it outside the lab and it was on the counter beside her purse.
Ginny. He remembered what she said the last time they spoke.
"You broke it, you should fix it."
"I'm trying to," he replied, "She won't let me."
"Stop making excuses."
Harry had planned to ask her for help with Hermione that time he was in London and she wouldn't cut him some slack. Ginny had known for a long time what this thing between Hermione and him was about, although he didn't know exactly how much she knew. His strained conversations with her even made him wonder if he knew everything she knew and whether or not what they knew were one and the same. Ginny confronted him right after Ron's death seeing right through how the tragedy wedged him and Hermione apart rather than bring them closer.
He wasn't sure how or when Ginny found out. Hermione must have told her. And even if Hermione didn't, having already concluded that his acceptance of the Auror position last year and immediate assignment to Toronto was about Hermione, it would not take much imagination on her part to take the extra leap about why Hermione did not want anything to do with him after Ron died.
Without giving her the Roy Hunt case details, he relented when she cornered him, admitting that he was the stranger who Hermione had an affair with and that Hermione found out from someone else. He was also really dying to tell someone and on hindsight, Ginny was probably the worst person to tell if he wanted sympathy. She already had a very jaded opinion of men who she trusted less than a used artifacts peddler in Knockturn Alley. He told her of how he and Ron had a fight about Hermione. There was some screaming and a lot of swearing, all on her part, and in the end, she had understandably sided with Hermione and with Ron. Ginny was never one to hide her emotions.
Months after, Ginny finally asked and let him tell her his side of the story. It was not as cathartic as he thought it would be because he could not tell her the entire truth either. There was indeed something to the saying that 'the truth will set you free.'
He looked upon the woman behind the glass window and felt the usual throb in his chest. For him, the only person who had to know the absolute truth was Hermione. Not that she could possibly know but he had been waiting a long time for her to hear him out and to release him of its burden, although he recognized that she was under no obligation to do that.
Now that they were talking again, it seemed very possible that he would get his chance. He was hopeful and cautious of the opportunity at the same time. For sure, he would go ahead and tell her if she allowed him, but he had to be prepared for unwanted outcomes. What if telling her everything did not bring about the healing that he so wished for? What if the truth wasn't enough?
Harry let Hermione's phone ring. In a previous life he would have picked up but he was an outsider now, more plainly so as she reminded him about why she was in Toronto and what she wanted that she couldn't get. What if after telling her the truth she still did not want him back in her life? What if she still wanted him to leave her alone?
He would find out the answer to that sooner or later but for now, it was about the potion. Hermione was just about to start. She had added a few extra rows of magical shields around the glass enclosure she was going to put the potion in and a few more surrounding the room.
"I'm ready," she said out loud, knowing he would be listening through the two-way open intercom.
"All set," he replied; she could hear him, too.
He watched her at work. She took out the Floyd phials from her repaired robes pocket and brought the potion up to eye level.
"Purple potion, clear with no visible residues, contained in a dragon washing reinforced Romanian phial," she described what she saw for the log file that they were creating.
Hermione put the full and empty unbreakable phials inside the working space, secured the top lid and inserted her hands into gloves that mimicked the pair of artificial ones inside of the compartment. It would allow her to manipulate the potion without having to touch it and gave her protected access.
"Slowly uncorking phial with potion…"
They waited and not five seconds later, a purple mist hissed from its small mouth, she had to immediately re-cork it. He looked at one of the screens on the panel in front of him, hit the zoom button and knew that if not for Hermione's anticipation of the possibility a lot more of the potion would have evaporated.
"It must not like air. We need the compartment to be in a vacuum."
He found a lever he had noticed before.
"Hang on," he said to her as he pulled it and an indicator light saying air-tight lit on the bottom right of the glass box.
After some time, the light stayed on and she continued. She unsealed the phial again and this time it did not evaporate. She tried the obvious.
"Specialis Revelio!"
Hermione let out an involuntary sigh. Scarpin's Revelaspell did not work. She did say it was unlikely to be that easy. After manually transferring half the potion to the empty unbreakable phial, she re-corked both, opened the top lid, retrieved one of them, and put it in her pocket.
"Saving some for the Ministry?" he asked as she replaced the cover, resealing it air tight.
"Trying to keep our options open," she answered.
The next series of wand motions were not familiar to him. Her intense expression said it all; it was going to be a challenge. When that seemed not to work either, she halved the working potion further, putting some back into the other unbreakable phial that stayed with her. There was not much concoction to work with and the refilling charm was also ineffective.
She summoned a container of reddish liquid from one of the desks and she braced herself as she introduced a drop of it into the phial.
Boom!
The lab immediately filled with purple smoke as the addition caused a muffled explosion. He was on his feet quickly and about to barge into the lab but her calm voice rang from somewhere within the room even before he could call out her name.
"I'm okay. Just stay back."
A vacuuming sound came from the ceiling and the mist started to dissipate. He had to see for himself that she was fine.
"Where are you? What happened?"
The cloud lifted and he saw her picking herself up a few feet away from where she last stood, wand in hand. Hermione had a magical protective shield on that she must have conjured just before she did what she did. It was probably something that had happened to her before.
There were shards of glass everywhere as the blast broke every breakable thing within five feet of the phial. The top lid of the glass enclosure had blown off to a corner but the potion container itself was intact.
"It didn't like me amplifying it," she answered. The way she said it reminded him how she treated potions like they had minds of their own. "That was really amateurish."
She was visibly upset at herself. The unbreakable phial was intact but the potion in it was gone. She paced around the more undamaged parts of the lab.
"Don't worry about it," he tried to make her feel better, "And if you end up using all of it to get answers, you should go ahead. We've gone this far and really, the phial is one of many. Another would surely turn up."
"I'm really hoping that wouldn't ever happen," Hermione said in frustration and talked as she flipped cupboards open and close, searching for something. She addressed the potion, "So, you are special. You won't magically reveal yourself and you won't allow magical reproduction or amplification. But I wonder…"
She found was she was looking for from one of the dusty cupboards way out in the corner. He recognized the contraptions; they were definitely Muggle. Once again, she halved the remaining potion, placed one phial snugly inside a centrifuge and put both the Muggle device and the potion within it back inside the protective airtight container, replacing the lid. The centrifuge whirled around at a fast clip as Hermione set how rapid and timed how long the revolutions were going to be, decanting drops of the less thick portions into several clear test tubes at each stop. He had an inkling of what she was trying to do and she confirmed.
"Seeing as I've tried magic and it didn't work, I'm hoping this will."
This was how Muggles would do it. It was a shot. She then lined up a few microscopes and began preparing specimen slides from the decanted fluids. As she was doing this Andy arrived.
Andy dumped an armful of books and reading materials on the counter in front of him and took one look at the destruction from within the observation room.
"I never liked science experiments. What happened?"
"We just had a contained explosion," Harry replied and recanted what Hermione had done so far.
"That explains doing it the Muggle way," Andy said then asked, insensitively, ""So, how are things with her? Have you managed to get her off her high horse and kiss her senseless yet?"
He immediately blushed like an inexperienced teenager and sputtered like one, "Um…Andy…"
"And don't you believe her when she tells you she doesn't want it because she so obviously does…" breaking glass interrupted her monologue, beaker and several test tubes, prompting Andy to doubt Hermione's skill at Muggle experiments, "Does she know what she's doing?"
"She knows what she's doing."
Hermione answered back dryly as she quickly cleaned her mess up and perused the first slides, comparing it with reference images on one of the working computers inside the room.
"Good," Andy replied, then mouthed a sentence and gesticulated to Harry, "I need to talk to you in private."
He shut off the sound input from their side.
"That was embarrassing. Why didn't you warn me that she could hear us?"
And he had to do that because he knew what she was going to say? Andy continued before he could answer.
"Well, it's true. Stuck up Brit. She should just do what she wants, have sex with you and get it over with because this tension between you two can't be good for case objectivity and concentration."
Andy sure did not mince with words. From Hermione's reaction this morning he doubted that was really what she wanted. He did wish Hermione had Andy's more practical approach.
"You think she wants to have sex with me?"
"For someone who has been with a lot of women you certainly don't know women."
"How do you figure that she does?"
"Harry, my slutty grandmother was part Veela. I learned and inherited a lot from her. Trust me, despite what you did to her, she wants you."
He was still skeptical and besides, he was aiming for her to want more than just sex from him.
"Right about now she already knows we're talking about her behind her back, probably wondering what about...don't touch that and let her!"
Andy smacked his hand away as he reached for the switch. She was crazy.
"I'm trying to rebuild trust here," he tried to explain.
Something broke again. Hermione looked upset as she repaired it. An Erlenmeyer flask. How he remembered that, was amazing.
"She already trusts you; she said so herself. Now let her prove it. You're not doing anything wrong which brings us back to my first point about your impaired objectivity," Andy's voice took a more serious tone. "The phials from Romania, they were ordered and received by a Healer from St. Mungo's. I'll give you one guess which Healer it is."
First Floyd and now, the phials. More and more it seemed that Hermione was a part of this case in more ways that they thought she was. It also troubled him that the evidence of a definite London connection pointed to her.
On the other hand, the conversation he just had with Kingsley made more sense now. The potion supply was coming from London and likely involved the Death Eaters. Were Lestrange and Floyd in this together? What about the other woman Floyd was working for last year?
He rose to Hermione's defense.
"There's a logical explanation for that."
"Of course there is."
"She probably didn't know."
"Sure. She didn't know that she ordered fifteen hundred Ministry regulated special phials and Merlin knows how many of them are missing."
"I trust her. She's above suspicion," he said to Andy firmly. "Now drop it and let's move on."
"Fine," Andy finally said, but he could sense her still doubting his judgment, which she probably thought was hormone influenced.
Slightly miffed at her distrust, he forcibly flipped the intercom switch back on.
"What else did you find out from the MLE?"
"The Squib witness at the diner does not exist. The name he gave the hit wizards was bogus."
"Great," he said, exasperated at yet another dead end, "Why did it take so long for them to respond to the commotion at the alley?"
"There was an active permit for a mock exercise filed by another phantom this morning. Until I called Jack, the Ministry thought it was some drill."
"And Floyd?"
"An all portraits alert has been sent out and we're monitoring every Muggle and Magical Hospital we have a presence in."
Floyd would be too smart for that.
"What about Jack?"
"Pissed as hell. I had to convince him the car wreck was necessary, admit that I got blindsided by your yet to be identified accomplice, lose the tail he put on me without being obvious and then I had to line up to get a fucking library card. Do you know how long it has been since I've been in a Muggle library?" Andy complained, "But from what I've read so far, some of these Bruins are absolutely nuts."
Andy had been looking at the screens on the panel in front of them which were now linked to the microscopes and the specimens mounted inside the lab. Harry did the same as more slides filled the screen. Each image looked different. All he could tell from his limited knowledge of Muggle biology from before he attended Hogwarts was that they all looked like cells.
"Fuck...I think I'm going to be sick..."
Obviously, Andy knew more than him. He looked over to where his partner was, just in time to see her ashen expression disappear into the nearby trash bin followed by retching noises. That was the second time today he saw her do that. She was having a really tough day. In the meantime, Hermione had joined them in the observation booth. He could already tell what they had before them was not good.
"What is it?" he asked Hermione, who had almost the same troubled look on her face as Andy had.
She pointed at one particular image on the screen.
"These spindle shaped structures interposed side by side are smooth muscles cells," she explained, then moved on to a magnified image, "It's typical of heart muscle and it's not human. This particular one belongs to a house elf."
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Draco Malfoy was reviewing a magical being case that he had just volunteered to take on. The file was thick and he did not have a lot of time to study it.
It was a challenge to concentrate. She left him a message to tell him Mexico was on hold. She said she had a personal emergency to attend to. She was in Toronto. There was no surprise there.
He really had to study the file. It did not help that the Death Eater mark continued to pester him despite the use of the numbing potion.
"You've been ignoring me."
Her voice was always cold; her words, no matter what she said, biting. He did not look up to see who it was. He did not have to.
"I've been busy," came his terse reply.
Her coming to see him was expected. He knew that there were limits to her patience and she forced him to give her his undivided attention.
"Now, now Draco, where are your manners? That's not the way to talk with your favorite aunt."
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Sir Isaac Umber was in his London office. Gringotts went better than expected. Things were going to move very fast and he had to act before Bellatrix Lestrange decided it was time to deal with him. He took out a Bruin medallion from his breast pocket and signaled for an urgent meeting.
As he did, a familiar yellow owl impatiently tapped on his glass window. The contact was unanticipated. Umber took the note from its leg and read it carefully.
Interesting.
Dear Bruin Elder,
You have a traitor in your midst. I suggest you clean house.
The Potion Master
Not long after he read it, his medallion pulsated, sending out bright red sparks at his touch. Another emergent Elder Council assembly, no doubt to discuss this first direct communication from the Potion Master to the Bruin Elders and what it meant that he knew exactly who all of them were.
What was the Potion Master up to?
He read the piece of parchment again. A traitor.
Sir Isaac Umber was well aware that there was a Bruin defector amongst them but the turncoat he was most concerned about wasn't the young, brown haired man whose image kept reflecting off the Potion Master's letter.