It was the first morning after the Special Operations Team had been formed.
The six of them sat behind their respective wobbly desks, pretending to sort through documents while actually sneaking looks at one another.
Lin Ze was leafing through his notebook.
Kingsley was polishing his wand.
Ben kept adjusting the tie that had been crooked for days.
Amelia was reading through a thick stack of case files.
Everett Banks was pushing up his glasses, which kept sliding down.
Reed Tonks was scratching the pimples on his face with the end of his quill.
The magical light on the ceiling kept flickering.
That was right-no one had come to fix it yet.
In the end, Ben was the first to lose patience.
"So, what operations does our Special Operations Team actually have?" He threw his tie onto the desk, giving up his struggle with the strip of cloth.
"I've been sitting here all morning, and apart from picking up Banks's glasses three times, I haven't done a thing."
"Four times." Banks pushed up his glasses.
Kingsley said nothing, looking at Lin Ze instead.
Lin Ze closed his notebook, stood up, and walked to the dust-covered blackboard at the front of the office.
Only half a stub of chalk remained in the tray. He picked it up and tried it; the chalk had dried out and become brittle, making a teeth-grating squeak as he wrote.
He wrote a name on the blackboard.
Bodo Crabbe.
At the sight of the name, Frick immediately sat up straight. "You're going after Crabbe?"
"No, no, no. How can you call a Special Operations Team operation 'going after' someone? It's an investigation!"
Lin Ze turned around and brushed the chalk dust off his hands.
"Crabbe spent seven years in the Auror Office and has direct ties to the Death Eaters. His younger cousin Malcolm has long been abusing his position in the Logistics Office to smuggle prohibited potion ingredients into Knockturn Alley. I have the times, locations, and passwords for their meetings."
Amelia looked up. "Is the evidence conclusive?"
"Of course."
Lin Ze opened his notebook and found the page containing his intelligence on Crabbe.
"Crabbe himself was also directly connected to last week's gathering of Death Eaters in Diagon Alley."
"Our first assignment is to arrest Crabbe?"
"I've wanted to take that bastard down for ages..." Ben looked eager to get started.
Lin Ze wrote two more names on the blackboard. "Crabbe is only a small fry. The real big fish are these two: Seymour Parkinson and Lucius Malfoy."
He drew a line beneath Parkinson's name with his chalk. "Parkinson used his position to indirectly tamper with three trial records involving suspected Death Eaters."
"Although Lucius doesn't hold a position at the Ministry of Magic, as a Hogwarts shareholder and a member of the Wizengamot, he has long obtained information about the Auror Office's operations through Goyle and Crabbe and reported it to the Dark Lord, causing numerous Auror Office operations to fail."
"Lucius Malfoy?" Ben's voice rose sharply.
"The Malfoy who's always donating to St. Mungo's, giving Floo Powder to the Ministry of Magic, and even donating broomsticks to Hogwarts?"
"That's him." Lin Ze nodded.
"But all those things he's been doing..." Ben scratched his head, his features scrunching together in confusion.
"With some things, you shouldn't just look at the surface." Lin Ze tossed the chalk stub into the tray.
"Besides, after donating so much money, would it be hard for him to get hold of a few documents proving his innocence?"
The office fell silent.
Kingsley set down his wand, his brow slightly furrowed.
Amelia's quill stopped in midair.
Lin Ze continued, "There's something else. As soon as Crabbe was suspended, Malfoy found him a defense lawyer and covered all the fees."
"How do you know?" Amelia asked.
"Because that lawyer cashed a check for a full three hundred Galleons at Gringotts just yesterday. The issuer was the Malfoy family."
"You can even find that out?" Ben sucked in a breath.
"Don't tell me you've planted an informant in Gringotts too?"
Lin Ze waved a hand. "I happen to know a friend who works at Gringotts."
He was naturally referring to Grot, the goblin he had rescued from the Death Eaters.
Yesterday, Grot had approached him of his own accord and said that, to repay him for saving his life, he could help him look into some of Gringotts' internal transaction records.
Lin Ze had mentioned it in passing, and Grot had spent the night copying every Malfoy family financial record he could access and delivered them to him. Stacked together, the documents were thick enough to serve as a brick.
"Even if we can trace his transactions, how do we expose what he's hiding?" Kingsley asked in a steady voice.
"Well..." Lin Ze tapped the blackboard with his knuckles.
"There's no rush to deal with Malfoy himself. The interests involved behind him are too extensive. We can start with Crabbe and Goyle and tear open a gap."
Amelia put down her quill and folded her hands over the case files. "So our first target is..."
The office door suddenly opened from outside.
Scrimgeour stood in the doorway, looking grim.
"There's bad news," he said.
"Seymour Parkinson didn't come to work this morning."
"Didn't come to work?" Ben blinked.
"Did he oversleep? He always looks like his kidneys are giving out. Maybe he drank too much last night..."
"No," Scrimgeour interrupted.
"His family came to the Ministry to report him missing. They said Parkinson received a letter last night, went deathly pale after reading it, and then disappeared."
The atmosphere in the office instantly shifted.
Lin Ze tapped his forehead with a finger. He had planned to go and have a "chat" with Parkinson this morning, but the man had fled first.
"Who sent the letter?" Amelia was the first to react.
Scrimgeour shook his head. "His family doesn't know either. All they know is that an owl delivered it to his window around eight or nine last night. After reading it, Parkinson shut himself in his study for an hour, then put on a cloak and went out. He hasn't come back since."
"Eight or nine..."
"How many of Parkinson's contacts are senior Death Eaters?" Amelia's gaze instinctively turned to Lin Ze.
"At least five that we can currently confirm." Lin Ze opened his notebook.
"The most likely person to have tipped him off is Amycus Carrow. He and Parkinson were in the same year at Hogwarts, and one of the three trial records Parkinson tampered with cleared Carrow's younger cousin of charges. He's also one of the Death Eaters' core members."
Kingsley frowned. "The Carrow brothers?"
"Yes, those two sickos who enjoy torturing Muggle-born wizards." Lin Ze closed his notebook.
"If Parkinson really has gone to the Carrow brothers, things are even more complicated. The Carrow brothers rank quite high among the Death Eaters. They may well already be arranging escape routes."
"Then let's go arrest Parkinson right now!"
Ben slapped the desk and stood up. The copy of A Compendium of Ministry of Magic Rules and Regulations propping up a chair leg finally gave way and slid straight out. Ben lurched, nearly falling flat on his face, but fortunately, Kingsley reacted quickly and caught him.
"Arrest him? Where?" Lin Ze countered. "He ran off last night. By now, he's probably already left Britain."
Once Ben had steadied himself, he scratched his head. "Then what do we do? Just let him get away?"
"Of course we're not leaving it at that." Lin Ze picked up a piece of chalk again and drew a large cross after Parkinson's name on the blackboard.
"Parkinson may have run, but the messes he left behind are still here. The trial records he tampered with, his correspondence with the Death Eaters... those things are enough for us to follow the trail and drag out the entire network behind him."