The Ministry of Magic was in pandemonium following the snatching of Harry Potter right from the heart of the Ministry building.
Aurors and Law Enforcement Officers were doing their best to control the panicked crowds of people while Amelia had her best people running around trying to find anything that would lead them to finding out just where Harry Potter and two thirds of the Order of the Phoenix had been taken too.
Workers from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures were going through book after book and file after file to try and gather absolutely everything they could on Phoenixes while people from the Department of Mysteries had broken out the scrying spells to try and get a reading on any of those snatched from the courtroom.
People from the Department of International Magical Cooperation were putting out alerts to as many other Ministries as possible across the globe as well as alerting the offices of the International Confederation of Wizards.
The first breakthrough, however, came from Mafalda Hopkirk and her colleagues in the Improper Use of Magic Office.
"What have you found?" demanded Amelia as she, Fudge and Scrimgeour entered the office after receiving a hurried message.
"It might be nothing," replied Hopkirk "However our underage magic sensors keep going off. The trigger is minor and it blinks out before we can get an accurate reading. But-"
At that moment every alarm attached to the Improper Use of Magic Office went off.
Hopkirk rounded of her deputy, Elizabeth Summerby "Who it is?"
"Hold on…" replied Summerby as she waves her wand over a large sheet of parchment, upon which runes were starting to appear. Several of these runes lit up and a name appeared in the middle of the sheet of parchment.
Harry Potter.
"Location?" asked Fudge.
Hopkirk was waving her wand about over the giant map of the UK and Ireland which hung on the wall. "Central England… West Midlands… Warwickshire… Mould-on-the Would? I thought that village was abandoned. No one has lived there in decades."
"Rufus get a team together, now," barked Amelia. "We'll need the finest Aurors and Hit Wizards you can locate. Mafalda, get those coordinates over to the Department of Magical Transportation. We need a dozen port keys to Mould-on-the-Wold as quickly as possible."
As Scrimgeour and Hopkirk hurried out of the room in order to carry out those commands, the Minister for Magic turned to the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and handed her a rolled up sheaf of parchment, held closed by a red ribbon and a red was seal which bore the official logo of the Wizengamot.
"The Wizengamot has agreed to this," he stated.
Amelia opened it and discovered that it was an authorisation form.
"Killing curse?" she read.
"Ideally we would want Dumbledore brought in alive and dosed with enough veritaserum to make him spill even his darkest secrets," explained Fudge. "However, if all of this has proven anything it is that Albus Dumbledore is a dangerous man who will do whatever he feels is necessary to see that things go according to his plans. I don't want there to be any messing around, especially with the life of Harry Potter at risk. If you can't bring Dumbledore down with standard Auror tactics then you are authorised to put an end to him for good. Just understand that this applies only to you, Scrimgeour and a few of the other more senior Aurors and Hit Wizards."
"Understood," replied Amelia. She wanted Dumbledore questioned as much as anyone, but she had no qualms about putting a permanent end to the man if the situation called for it. Good Aurors were hard to come by, after all.
The Weasley family was gathered together in Arthur's former office. No one was currently permitted to leave the Ministry and the family had felt the need for some alone time so they had settled for the relative privacy offered by the small office room in a far corner of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
Hermione was there too. She didn't really want to be there but had just ended up getting shuffled along with the crowd. The day had been a very trying one. After all, it's not every day that many of those whom you trust implicitly are revealed to be so horribly corrupt.
It was enough to give anyone a headache. She had, of course, heard a few of the things that had been coming out following the arrests of so many members of The Order of the Phoenix, but it was one thing to read a few newspaper articles and quite another to hear it all and more in a massive courtroom.
Respect for authority, especially your teachers, was something that had been driven into Hermione Granger's mind from an early age. To have those figures of authority then go and betray their students and the country at large to such an extent was a difficult pill to swallow.
To make matters worse, it now looked like many of those betrayers of her trust were going to avoid their punishments. On top of that, after taking a good number of The Order away, Fawkes had gone and taken Harry too.
Despite their differences, she hoped that Harry was alright. She also hoped that Dumbledore would choke on one of his lemon flavoured sweets and die before he and The Order could get too far away.
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