On his first day working at the Records Management Office, Lin Ze became certain of one thing.
This place was no tomb of the living dead.
It was a gold mine.
Pure gold.
At nine in the morning, Pick ambled over with a steaming cup of black tea and saw Lin Ze hunched over his desk, leafing through a file volume thick enough to use as a brick.
"Well, young people certainly have drive." Pick blew on his steaming tea. "So enthusiastic on your first day. You don't see that often."
Lin Ze looked up with a textbook fake workplace smile. "Just doing my job. Just doing my job."
He wasn't lying.
He really was full of drive.
Because what he was reading was just too damn good.
Take the volume in his hands, for instance.
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement's travel expense reimbursement records for 1978.
That volume alone had yielded at least three pieces of information he could use.
For instance, a deputy head whose name he already couldn't remember had taken a business trip to Paris that year. His reimbursement form read, "International Magical Cooperation Symposium, five days," but the actual attendance records showed he had only attended for half a day. He had spent all the remaining time at the Paris Opera House and nearby wineries.
Then there was a High Inquisitor in the Wizengamot who had applied for hefty travel allowances three years running on the grounds of "investigating Death Eater-related cases." Yet the places he visited had absolutely nothing to do with areas of Death Eater activity. They did, however, coincide perfectly with Europe's major Quidditch pitches.
"These aren't reimbursement records. This is a bloody travel guide," Lin Ze muttered as he flipped through the pages.
He marked those pages, closed the volume, and picked up the next one.
Over the next few days, Lin Ze tore through the Records Management Office's holdings with almost freakish efficiency.
He set himself a schedule-first the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, then the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, the Department of Magical Transportation, and the Department of International Magical Cooperation, finishing with the Wizengamot and the Minister's Office.
There was a reason for that order.
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement was his home base. He needed to get to know his own backyard first.
The Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes and the Department of Magical Transportation wielded real power, with plenty of graft and shady dealings.
The Department of International Magical Cooperation involved connections on Mr Delacour's side. It wouldn't hurt to learn about it in advance.
As for the Wizengamot and the Minister's Office, those were the final feast. He had to save them for the right moment.
At first, Pick thought the new lad's enthusiasm was just a passing fancy that would fizzle out in a couple of days.
After all, the Records Management Office was so dull that even house-elves didn't want to linger.
But Lin Ze proved through his actions that his enthusiasm wasn't a passing fancy.
It burned for three days.
Then kept burning on the fourth.
On the fifth, it burned even brighter.
"Has someone put some sort of diligence charm on you?"
One day, Pick passed Lin Ze's workstation with his teacup and saw him consulting three file volumes at once. Two notebooks lay open beside him, their pages densely covered in codes and symbols only he could understand.
"I just think these files are pretty interesting," Lin Ze said without looking up.
"Interesting?" Pick looked as though he had heard something out of a fairy tale. "I've worked in the Records Management Office for thirty years. This is the first time I've heard anyone call this wastepaper interesting."
"Don't you think so? Every file is a story."
Lin Ze finally looked up, his eyes gleaming with a light unfamiliar to Pick.
"Look at this one. The Department of Magical Transportation's Floo Network maintenance records for 1976. On the surface, it's just a bunch of numbers and dates, but compare them carefully and you'll find that the Floo Network underwent so-called 'routine maintenance' every October, and the maintenance period happened to fall during the finals week of the International Quidditch World Cup."
"That means one of the department's leaders back then was a Quidditch fan who gave himself time off every year under the pretext of maintaining the Floo Network so he could watch the matches."
Pick stared for quite a while before letting out a raspy laugh.
"Interesting." He shook his head and returned to his seat with his teacup. "Very interesting."
Lin Ze went back to poring over the files.
What he had just mentioned were only trivial matters in the files, brought up merely to satisfy Pick's curiosity.
He hadn't breathed a word about anything truly important.
For instance, he had discovered in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes' files that the "accidental explosion" in Knockturn Alley in 1980 hadn't been an accident at all. Someone had deliberately set a fire to destroy a batch of prohibited potions that the Aurors were about to seize.
And the arsonist happened to work in the same department as Parkinson.
Then there was an internal investigation record from 1979 he had found in the Department of International Magical Cooperation's dossiers.
A senior translator had used his position to secretly copy at least five classified documents containing important intelligence for a third party.
Although the investigation record didn't explicitly identify the third party, Lin Ze inferred from the timeline and the types of cases involved that it was most likely the Death Eaters.
And that translator's boss's boss happened to have been Mr Delacour's colleague in France.
"Well, damn."
Lin Ze drew another connecting line in his notebook. "This web just keeps getting bigger."
He carefully pulled out the original investigation record, made a copy with the Doubling Charm, then returned the original to its place.
He folded the copy and slipped it into his coat's inner pocket.
This wasn't about threatening anyone.
It was simply so that, when necessary, he would have enough bargaining chips to protect himself.
In the days that followed, Lin Ze's life became remarkably regular.
Every morning, he got up at seven, bought a bacon sandwich on the street corner for breakfast, and reported to the Records Management Office at eight sharp. Then he plunged into the piles of documents until he finished work at five in the afternoon.
At noon, he went to the canteen for lunch, occasionally running into Scrimgeour or Frick.
Whenever Scrimgeour saw him, he asked, "How are things in the Records Office?" Lin Ze always answered, "Pretty good. Nice and quiet." Scrimgeour always nodded at that, his expression showing a relieved satisfaction that said, "That's a load off my mind."
What he didn't know was that Lin Ze's "nice and quiet" meant going through more than twenty file volumes a day, sorting and categorizing over thirty pieces of sensitive information, and adding a dozen or more pages of coded notes to his notebook.
His notebook was already more than half full.
Every page was densely packed with compromising information, weaknesses, personal connections, and tangled interests involving personnel from the various departments.
Some pages bore a small triangle in red ink-the mark for "top priority," meaning that the information held extremely high value as a bargaining chip.
Some pages had a circle drawn in blue ink-the mark for "worth cultivating," meaning that although there was nothing seriously compromising on the person, their stance was uncertain and they could be won over.
Other pages simply bore a cross in black ink-the mark for "beyond saving," meaning that the person had thrown in their lot entirely with the Death Eaters. There was no point trying to win them over; they could only be dealt with along with the rest after Voldemort's downfall.
Sometimes Pick rose from his chair and wandered past Lin Ze's workstation with his teacup, glancing out of the corner of his eye at whatever Lin Ze was reading.
But all he could see was a mass of densely written code, and he couldn't make any sense of it.
"Are you up to something shady, lad?" Pick couldn't help asking again.
"How could I be?" Lin Ze closed his notebook and gave him an innocent smile.
"I'm just keeping a diary, jotting down my thoughts on each day's work. Would you like a look?"
"I'll pass." Pick waved a hand. "I've no desire to read a young person's diary. If I come across anything soppy, it'll make these old teeth ache."
Smiling, Lin Ze tucked the notebook into his drawer, then stood up and stretched.
There were five days left until Halloween.