The narrow faced man wanted to look over his shoulder. He wanted to see if anyone had followed him. He needed to see if anyone was watching the telephone booth that he was soon to step into. He wanted to know if the risks that he was taking would collapse onto himself. He kept his head straight and his eyes active enough to navigate the busy sidewalks of London but not any more than that.
"Bob, you should have thought these thoughts a year ago" He silently scolded himself. It had seemed to be an elegant solution thirteen months ago. His superior at the Ministry's Department of Interspecies Affairs was new; a replacement for an elderly witch who had retired just six months previous. The wizard wasn't incompetent, or even lazy. He was just a rather nasty bugger. He was an up and comer. A pureblood with all the right connections and all the right training. He even was mostly honest as the obvious grifts and grafts had been firmly and mostly politely refused. One family did not understand that the old ways were no longer operable and DMLE had to have a nice long chat with them. Potter had scared the Ministry muckety-mucks and upper class twits something fierce with his fiendfyre dragon routine in the atrium just two years ago.
No his boss was just an arse. And he expected too much from everyone in the department as shortened lunches become extended evenings and then it became re-editing documents over the weekend. He did not care that Bob's Muggle niece wanted her slightly eccentric and very fun uncle to be at her birthday party - she would only turn eight once. He did not care that Ella's back started to ache after six hours bending over a desk proofing a parchment. He did not care that Aloysius was being kept on the department for another eighteen months until he could retire more as an indirect pension and pay-off to his family than as a reflection of his ability. He just did not care.
So he had started to grumble. He had grumbled with his colleagues when they worked on a Saturday afternoon instead of watching Chudley get destroyed by the Harpies. He grumbled at the pub while the buxom bartender poured him and a few of his mates another pint. He grumbled as he waited in line at the shops on Diagon Alley before he headed back to his empty house. Cassie, his dear wife, had been sent to a camp by Voldemort's coup that empowered the bigots like Umbridge, and she never returned. He sat in his parlor and drank a few more firewhiskeys as he grumbled to himself.
And then one day, a note showed up on his desk.
"If you want to do more than grumble, show up at the Prancing Pixie, alone 2000 Tuesday"
There was a small dragon drawn as if it was made from fiendfyre where there should have been a signature.
He showed up at the Prancing Pixie. He bought himself a drink. He tipped a few of the girls who were lacksdaisacally gyrating as they were between the dinner crowd and the late night crowd when they would make their money for the shift. He had been here a few times; a stag night for Cassie's brother eleven years ago was the last time. Cassie had tried to give him hell when he came home smelling of cheap perfume and cheaper firewhiskey. He had sworn on his magic that he had only eyes for her, and she made him prove it to her satisfaction three times that night. He smiled at the memory and then tears began to well at his eyes as he thought about his wife. He looked at his watch and saw that it was now a few minutes after his meeting was scheduled.
He was just about to get up, when one of the girls draped her leg around his waist. Her long blue hair swung through the air and she squeezed his nose close to her breasts – She tilted her head down and wiggled her body as if they were snogging before she whispered
"You need a private dance in Room 4 as a mutual friend is waiting for you"
He swallowed. He could barely think as the music pounded in his head and her intoxicating scent filled him with memories for a moment. He could not speak. He only nodded. The blue haired vixen finished the dance and pulled several galleons from her satisfied customer's hands before she dismounted him and walked up to Room 4.
That nod thirteen months ago led to a meeting with a man who was completely unremarkable. The polyjuice had hidden the identity of Bob's controller from him. All Bob could say is that the man looked like he could be thirty or sixty with pale skin and chocolate brown eyes framed by a fringe of mouse brown hair that was almost always under a hat. If he had to truly guess, his controller was a woman as every now and then there was a flash of clumsiness as if he did not know where his hips and his center were.
The controller gave him a promise. Bob did not need to be brave. He just needed to keep his eyes open and ears alert. A small buttonhole camera became part of his routine. The screening station in the Atrium looked for magical surveillance items instead of merely Muggle. He took pictures. He remembered conversations, he made notes of who was talking with whom and which countries were engaged with the Ministry's diplomats. And whenever he saw a chalk mark on a lamp post near his apartment in the Muggle East End, he would collect all of his material and make a dead drop. Horizontal lines meant the dead drop was at the men's washroom in Kings Cross Station, a pair of vertical lines indicated that the drop would occur as he waited in line for his morning tea in the Ministry cafeteria. He had never seen who had made the brush pass. Once he thought he had felt something but he saw no one around him. Criss-cross lines like he saw this morning meant he needed to go to a telephone booth where he could slide a small button onto the underside of the telephone.
He had made twenty one drops. And it seemed like his work was paying off. At least once or twice, the Daily Prophet reported on Potter and his Marauders attacking a target that he had mentioned in his dispatches. At least once, the Aurors had attempted to lay a trap for Potter. Bob had overheard a discussion between the consul in Zurich and his boss who was brown nosing the older Ravenclaw about a plan to bring in the gnomes to place liens on the Dark Lord's income generating properties. The entire team had worked one hundred and twenty two hours out of one hundred and sixty eight hours that week making arrangements and smoothing over troublesome clauses in complex contracts. He managed to make an emergency dead drop on a Wednesday night and he had left both curtains in his small flat open the next morning. Friday afternoon, the division had been sent home.
Bob tried to hide his nerves as he picked up the phone and placed a few coins into the device. He placed a call to an old friend from his bachelor days and asked if he was up for a pint or two at the pitch next week. Plans were made, and as he was making his final pleasantries, his fingers placed another packet of information underneath the device. As he hung up the phone, he collected his breath and walked out into the London morning.
Three steps later, he was stunned, and then half a dozen Aurors, led by Susan Bones, and dressed as if they were Metropolitan police began to scream at him to stay on the ground. An Auror slammed their knee into his back and yanked his shoulders hard. A pair of magical handcuffs were slapped onto his wrists and then another pair of steel muggle cuffs followed. His breath was ragged and his vision was limited as he was never a powerful wizard. An Auror stunner was a lot to take for men and women who knew that they were seeking battle. Bob started to cry as the Auror squad threw him into the back of a white van.
In the back of the van, he was alone and still as he was petrified just before the doors slammed shut. The drive could have been an hour. It could have been four hours. His bladder was filling up and a sneeze was waiting for release. The silence filled the dark space and Bob realized that he was truly and completely alone.
He had no information to trade. His handler was unknown. The blue haired girl at the Prancing Pixie was likely using a glamour; almost every girl there did and the girls almost never lasted long. Potter and his crew would not rescue him. They could not rescue him. They had visibly tortured a Ministry mole, Willoughby Witherspoon, in broad daylight just weeks ago. Anyone even suspected of being a Marauder spy was going to be thrown into a hole behind war wards and then forgotten about until the interrogators could claim every memory and every fact and even every suspicion and half formed observation of his. And then, if he was lucky, he would be thrown through the Veil.
Six hours later, the Daily Prophet had an exclusive headline:
"Ministry captures four spies of the Dark Lord – Justice will prevail"
Three hundred miles away, the Dark Lord was satisfied. The Ministry had indeed captured four of his spies. They, if they were lucky, would be dead within a week. They had been told that they were wagering their lives and they had lost. They had not been lost due to mistakes that they had made. They had not been lost due to breaks in the courier chains. They had been dangles and isolated agents who were primarily given George chickenshit intelligence. They had passed a few useful nuggets; agent ALIEN probably saved the Dark Lord twenty thousand galleons and several hundred hours of solicitors' assistance with an emergency warning months ago. But almost everything that they had passed along, George had already known.
No, the four spies who could only hope for the Veil, were first detected by an up and coming Auror who had survived the Voldemort years by towing the line between expectations and duty extraordinarily well. Winston Wallace was making a name for himself as a spy-catcher. He had found extendable ears two years ago that covered the Auror bullpen and since then he had been closing information gaps and holes with alarming alacrity. Last night's sweep would be a very notable feather in his cap.
Soon Auror Wallace would be the head of ever evolving Ministry counter-intelligence office. And there he would do an amazing job of following his pledged Lord's orders.