Chapter 131. Change of Plans.
Malfoy Manor.
The man in the red armchair had been perfectly still for some time, except for one finger tapping a slow, monotonous rhythm on the arm of the chair, and his eyes, which never left Lucius. Lucius was doing his best not to shake visibly, but he wasn't entirely succeeding. His father stood beside him, outwardly composed, though Abraxas held his wand under the table and hadn't let go. In a mood like this, Tom was capable of anything. Abraxas would not watch his son be destroyed without at least making an attempt.
His devotion to the Dark Lord was genuine, and had been for many years. He was among the most committed of the inner circle, and he knew it. But family was family. Abraxas had raised Lucius with an iron hand, and he had loved him the entire time. That was simply how pure-blood men were built.
The rest of the hall sat in the silence of people who had decided that being invisible was the safest strategy.
"...our contacts among the Aurors were able to identify the organization that has inserted itself into this conflict. They call themselves Black Star. They are based primarily in Northeastern Europe. Their primary trade is dark artifacts." Lucius kept his voice steady and his eyes away from his Lord's face. It was easier that way. "Total manpower is estimated at roughly four hundred. We could not get an exact number." The room stirred. Glances were exchanged. Nobody had expected a figure that large. The Death Eaters numbered fewer than two hundred, not counting non-human allies. The arithmetic was not in their favor. That knowledge spread through the assembled pure-bloods like cold water, because when you stripped away the ideology and the oaths and the fine robes, most of them were fundamentally risk-averse. Hunting Muggle-borns in numbers was tolerable. A straight fight against a well-organized foreign force with superior numbers was something else entirely. "We also recovered some intelligence on recent gang activity. Several small groups, roughly twenty members each, have recently merged and begun expanding, including into our territory. A source placed inside one of them tells me the consolidation began about a week ago, when outsiders appeared and began offering assistance to a minor outfit called Ink. I believe Black Star is behind it."
"Is there anything else?" Tom asked. His voice was level. That was the tell: when it went level like that, you were watching a man holding himself back by a thread. The campaign was not going according to plan, and hadn't been for some time, and he was very tired of it. But he could not afford to lose anyone else to one of his rages. Not at this stage.
"One more thing. Something is moving inside the Ministry. A significant number of Aurors have been recalled from leave. Several patrol units have been pulled back to headquarters. That is the extent of what we have."
"Crouch?" The single word fell into the room and Lucius sagged in his chair as if the bones had gone out of him. At his side, Abraxas breathed out.
"Father is rarely at home these days," said a young man in a leather jacket, perhaps a year or two older than Severus. He spoke with the easy confidence of someone who had grown up used to being listened to. "But he returned yesterday, and I was able to catch part of a conversation he had with the Minister. The details were limited. They mentioned Black Star. The recruitment drive for the clerical office, scheduled for tomorrow. And the phrase 'be ready.' I couldn't stay long enough to hear more without being noticed."
"My Lord." An elderly man with gray at his temples rose to his feet. "Harold Minchum is not a fool. I'd treat this as a probable trap."
"Go on."
"Yes. My assumption is that the Ministry extracted faces or identifiers from the memories of those they captured in the park. The recruitment is the cover. They intend to catch Black Star people walking in voluntarily. My recommendation is that we stand back and let the two of them tear each other apart." Heads nodded around the table, more than a few with the visible relief of people who wanted very badly not to be involved in anything that had four hundred trained operatives on the other side.
The Dark Lord looked at the faces in front of him and felt something that was not quite contempt, though it was close. Cowardice disgusted him more than almost any other quality. And yet cowardly men were the easiest to own, because they wanted nothing complicated: wealth, safety, and the feeling of power without any of its actual costs.
"We'll hold back. The Lestranges. What's the status?"
"They've dug in. The fine has been paid, but extracting them quickly is going to require some creative thinking." Abraxas stood and said it without flinching. Voldemort's right eye twitched. The tapping finger came down harder. "I'll find a way."
"You have a month." He hated failure with the same intensity he hated disobedience, and he had already been forced to tolerate a great deal of both.
Right now, Tom wanted nothing more than to introduce Abraxas to the Cruciatus and simply watch. He pulled himself back from it. Abraxas was irreplaceable. Losing him would cost far more than the satisfaction was worth. The same calculation applied to Lucius, to the Lestranges, to the Blacks: their skill, their connections, their money, their reach. You did not break tools you still needed.
"Yes, My Lord." Abraxas sat down and, for the second time that afternoon, allowed himself to breathe.
The meeting ended thirty minutes later. Nobody had been cursed. This was unusual enough that several people left looking faintly confused. The Dark Lord, as a rule, liked to subject at least one or two to the Cruciatus curse before dismissing everyone. It kept the rest sharp.
The last person cleared the doors. The chair Abraxas had been sitting in exploded into splinters. Tom's eyes went red.
London. Whitehall Street. Ministry of Magic Headquarters.
Several floors underground, in the wide, bright Atrium with its green and gold decor, Moody stood and watched people file past him into a small side room where the interviews were being held. He was under Polyjuice, wearing the body of an elderly woman, and he had been standing there for two and a half hours with his magical eye doing the work that the Polyjuice was designed to conceal.
I want to walk into a wall headfirst, he thought. It was not a new thought. It had been occurring to him at regular intervals all morning.
The eye saw through everything. That was its function. It was why he was here. The problem was that the Ministry's security protocol required all candidates to pass through in a state that left little to the imagination, making it easy to search for concealed marks. That meant they weren't wearing much, and Moody's eye couldn't be selectively switched off. He saw everything. Mostly men. Women were perhaps ten percent of the applicants, and of those, not one appeared to be under forty. Moody had faced down Death Eaters, dark creatures, and situations that had cost him body parts. He hadn't been prepared for this.
"Madam, I'm Ronald Wiggins." A heavyset man with a wide smile introduced himself cheerfully. Moody's eye twitched.
"Of course. Go on through." He kept his smile in place, wrote the name down, and put a '+' beside it. The mark dissolved from the page a few seconds later. Don't end up in my squad. Please.
This was, nominally, a genuine recruitment drive. The Aurors were genuinely short-handed. Over thirty years of this work, Moody had developed a sense for the ones worth taking on. The '+' was his shorthand for a real prospect.
When the next candidate stepped forward, Moody felt something between interest and resignation. Young woman. Dark hair. Good figure. And directly beneath her left breast, the black star mark.
"Hello, I'm Betty McLaughlin."
Moody nodded, wrote the name, added an '×'. "Go on through."
She was not the last. They had tried charms to hide the marks. To his eye, which could see through any spell or illusion and straight through solid matter, the effort was touching but ultimately pointless. He counted four in total before the morning was done. Too few. They had guessed, or close enough.
Betty, for her part, was feeling extremely optimistic. The first applicant through had reported back within minutes: three male judges, Crouch among them. Betty had been picked for this assignment because she bore a remarkable resemblance to Crouch's wife at roughly thirty years old. The mission parameters were straightforward: get close to the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
She stepped into the office and felt the gaze land on her almost immediately. The other two were looking as well.
This is going to be easy.
Half an hour later, the Minister of Magic was sitting in a room two floors up, watching the entire thing unfold through a charmed projection on the wall, and reading the operational summary at the same time.
"They guessed." He rubbed his temple. "Should have been more patient." He set the parchment down, chewing on his pipe. "Twenty out of four hundred. That's nothing. We'll have to play the long game." He was quiet for a moment, then slapped his own forehead hard enough to make a sound. "Idiot. I should have started feeding them false intelligence the moment we identified their people. We've had them mapped for days." He shook his head at himself. "Getting slow in my old age. Summon Chester and Miller!"
"Yes, Minister!" came a voice from behind the door, followed by the sound of hurried footsteps retreating down a corridor.
One week later. Severus's house.
Severus was stretched out on the sofa, ostensibly resting. His eyes were open, fixed on the window and the unremarkable July sunshine beyond it, and he had the look of a man with an unresolved problem lurking behind his expression.
Nagini came through the door and slid onto his chest without a word. She had been in Diagon Alley with Nelly and had only just gotten back. "What's the matter?"
"Black Star. I can't decide what to do about them."
"You didn't want to get involved."