Lin Ze stuffed the baguette brought back from France into Ben's arms. Ben looked down at the bread that was so hard that it could be used as a stick. He hesitated for a moment, then opened his mouth and took a bite.
Click.
The whole office heard the crisp sound.
"Is this thing... really bread?" Ben covered his cheek.
"Of course, this is the romance of France people." Lin Ze flipped through the documents on the table without raising his head.
"Then I'll give this romance back to you, I can't bear it..." Ben pushed the baguette with only a few teeth marks to Lin Ze.
Kingsley pulled out the wand and tapped the bread.
A layer of pale golden light floated on the surface of the bread, and then softened at a speed visible to the naked eye.
"Huh? This is Softening Charm?" Ben's eyes widened.
"Softening Charm was originally used to soften magic ore."
Kingsley inserted the wand back into his waist, "But for things like spells, it depends on how you use them."
Ben tried to take another bite, and was so moved that he almost cried, "Kingsley, if you are unemployed in the future, you can open a softened bread shop next to the France bakery, and you will ensure a prosperous business."
"Thank you, I have no plans to do so at the moment."
Lin Ze was flipping through the files piled on his desktop, and his fingers suddenly stopped.
That was a case report transferred from Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, dated three days ago.
West End of London An explosion occurred in an abandoned warehouse. When Auror arrived at the scene, he found a large amount of prohibited Potions residue in the warehouse. It was initially determined that it was an underground Potions processing site.
The case is currently being followed up by Auror Office.
Originally, this case had nothing to do with Special Operations Team, but Lin Ze noticed a name mentioned in the last line of the notice.
The industrial emblem Malfoy family was found on the remaining packaging boxes at the scene.
"Kingsley."
Lin Ze pushed the report in front of Kingsley, "Do you know about this case?"
Kingsley lowered his head and glanced. "I know, Director Scrimgeour said it is an ordinary contraband case, just leave it to Auror Office, without our intervention."
"What do you think?"
Kingsley read the notice from beginning to end, then leaned back on the chair and crossed his arms.
"The industrial emblem of Malfoy family appears in an underground Potions processing station, which is not unusual in itself. There are several legal Potions companies under Malfoy family's name, and it is normal for the packaging boxes to leak out."
Lin Ze nodded, folded the notice, and put it into his notebook.
The office door was pushed open, and Moody strode in.
"Hey, Lin, are you back?" Moody said gruffly.
"Back."
"France How is it over there?"
"I've been working hard for a long time but I didn't get much. The real owner also ran away. Overall, it wasn't very successful."
Moody snorted, walked to his desk and sat down.
The chair made a shrill creak, protesting the owner's heavy weight.
"At least you're back alive, which is good news for us." Moody picked up a tin wine jug from the table, unscrewed the lid and took a sip.
"Scrimgeour told me that there are people at Wizengamot who are making small moves, accusing Special Operations Team of excessive investigation scope, non-compliant procedures, and voting to limit our law enforcement authority."
"It's just that the person who proposed restrictions on us this time is not Malfoy."
"Huh?" Lin Ze glanced at Moody curiously.
"It's Crouch."
"Crouch?" Ben said in confusion.
"Crouch is not from our side? He even approved the establishment document of our action team before!"
"That's why the motion he proposed has weight."
"If even our direct superiors feel that we have gone too far, the Wizengamot congressmen will only feel that we are lawless even more."
Moody leaned back on the chair, his normal eye staring at the ceiling, and his magic eye turned to nowhere.
"Crouch's original words were, 'Special Operations Team played an important role in Death Eaters's investigation, but any power needs supervision'. When he said this, he was at the hearing of Wizengamot, and six representatives of Pure-blood families were sitting across from him."
"So he was picked up?" Lin Ze said.
"Nonsense." Moody snorted.
"Crouch, what's sitting under his butt is not a chair, but a brazier. But since he said this in front of everyone, it means we can't pretend we didn't hear it."
The office was quiet for a while.
I looked at Lin Ze on the left, Kingsley on the right, and Moody on the right, then raised my hand carefully, like a student asking a question in class.
"Then what should we do? We can't hand over our authority ourselves, right?"
"Of course not." Lin Ze and Moody said in unison.
Lin Ze stood up and walked to the blackboard.
He picked up the chalk and wrote a new name on the blackboard.
Malfoy.
"Crouch gave in at the hearing because we were indeed too high-profile." Lin Ze turned around and dusted off the chalk dust on his hands.
"We arrest people one after another and interrogate one after another. The Wizengamot gang sees their old friends and acquaintances being sent to Azkaban by us. It would be strange not to jump at the chance."
"Do you have any good ideas?" Moody asked.
"Of course, we can openly cooperate with Crouch's motion and take advantage of it. All procedures should be followed and reported in advance, so that Wizengamot and his gang can't find fault."
Lin Ze tapped the line on the blackboard with his finger, "Secretly, target the core of their interest group - Malfoy family."
"As long as you can find any illegal clues related to Malfoy family, don't let go of any of them."
Kingsley nodded thoughtfully. "So what we have to do is cooperate on the surface and continue to investigate secretly."
"No."
Lin Ze corrected him, "What we want to do is make everyone think that our hands and feet are tied, and then take advantage of them to relax their vigilance and drag the real big fish ashore."
Moody let out a hoarse laugh, and the magic eye turned twice in its orbit, and finally settled on Lin Ze.
"Boy, did you drink anything Potions that you shouldn't have in the past few days France? Your mind is now brighter."
"Maybe I ate a few snails raw over there." Lin Ze said expressionlessly.
Ben's face scrunched up. "Snail? The living kind?"
"Just kidding."
Lin Ze patted Ben on the shoulder, "I only eat bread."
Ben lowered his head and looked at the baguette in his hand that had been softened by Kingsley, and suddenly felt that it was not so unpalatable.
In the next few days, Special Operations Team entered an almost purely paper-based work mode.
On the surface, the frequency of their actions has been significantly reduced.
The high-profile arrests of the past are gone, replaced by mountains of paperwork and endless procedural filings.
Amelia spends twice as much time in the office every day as before, because all action applications need to be approved step by step according to the new regulations. The prerequisite document for an arrest warrant alone is more than ten pages thick.
Ben once helped organize documents. In the middle of sorting, he suddenly lay on the table and howled. "I chose to be Auror to catch bad guys, not to write a paper!"
Kingsley said without raising his head, "I think if we continue like this, we might as well stop arresting people and just contact the publisher to publish a book."
"Okay, let's write it quickly. We fell behind too much approval materials last week, and we have only completed one-third of it."
Ben glanced at Kingsley sadly and continued to lower his head and fight with the pile of forms.
But secretly, Lin Ze is not idle at all.
Through Grot, he retrieved all the public transaction records of Malfoy family in Gringotts in the past five years, and through Harper, he retrieved the tax declaration documents of the industries under the name of Malfoy from Records Management Office.
He even used Mr Delacour's contacts at France and obtained a copy of the customs declaration form for Malfoy family to import Potions raw materials from France.
All the files were gathered together and spread out on Lin Ze's desk with uneven legs, almost completely submerging the desktop.
Lin Ze spent two full days combing through these documents from beginning to end, and there were more than a dozen densely written pages in his notebook.
At the end of writing, he discovered a very interesting pattern.
Malfoy family applies for a large number of legal Potions production licenses from Ministry of Magic every year, and the declared output is also very large. However, the quantity of Malfoy brand Potions available on the market is far less than the declared output.
"The production volume and sales volume do not match up." Lin Ze spread his notebook in front of Kingsley.
Kingsley looked down for a long time, then raised his head again, and said with a complicated expression, "What are you writing? I can't understand a word."
"Sorry." Lin Ze took the notebook back and re-wrote the key data in Chinese characters in English.
Kingsley After reading this, his brows slowly wrinkled.
"You are saying that while Malfoy was producing the legal Potions, it transferred part of its production capacity to illegal channels?"
Lin Ze tapped the row of numbers with his fingers, "Judging from these data, at least 60% of the output is unknown. Based on Malfoy family's production scale, this volume is enough to supply half of Britain's underground black market."
"But we can't prove anything just by looking at these numbers."
"These Ministry of Magic tax filing documents and Gringotts transaction records may allow us to identify some problems with Malfoy, but they are far from accusations."
At this time, Moody came back from the interrogation room.
He pushed the door as hard as ever, and the door panel hit the wall with a loud bang, which scared Ben who was dozing off and jumped up from his chair.
"Who! What! Where!" Ben waved his hands, and there were two more parchment marks on his face.
"Finished another review." Moody walked to his chair and sat down, taking a sip of the contents of the wine bottle, "Rookwood told me that Yu Dang, after reviewing the whole afternoon, spit out a few more names."
"Is there anything related to Malfoy?" Lin Ze asked.
Moody's magic eyes suddenly turned around. "How do you know?"
"Guess." Lin Ze leaned on the back of the chair.
Moody took out a piece of crumpled parchment from his arms and spread it on the table.
"The guy confessed that one week before Dark Lord's downfall, Malfoy asked him to help transport a batch of things from Knockturn Alley's underground channels. He didn't know where exactly they were transported."