Rising Stakes
The first few days were highly frustrating for Rupert Wilkinson. Although he was able to do everything a fly can do by nature – fly and walk on six legs, for example – his compound eyes were not well suited for recognising faces. When he managed to get into the Slytherin common room on Friday evening, he flew aimlessly back and forth for a long time because he had to look at every single person for a moment to identify it. When he sat down on a table for this purpose, he had to be careful not to be casually hit by a student. When he had at least found Julian and was about to sit on his shoulder, Bernie's cat appeared and had fun chasing him. Completely exhausted, he hung himself on the ceiling of the Slytherin common room to rest a little. With all this, he did not pay attention to the time and finally had to realise that it was too late, no one entered or left the common room and he was therefore forced to spend the night on the ceiling, with his sleep being disturbed on top of everything by a fat spider that had probably not yet had dinner and forced Rupert to flee in panic several times.
The next day, a Saturday, he was therefore so exhausted that he slept the whole day away and decided to continue his shadowing operation only on Sunday. Rupert was furious. This was not how he had imagined the life of a secret agent!
On Sunday he did manage to sit on Roy's shoulder and stay on it for a long time – on the black robe he wasn't easily noticed as a fly – but Roy spent the morning in the library, didn't say anything of importance to Rupert at lunch, and then went for a walk with Arabella, on which Rupert couldn't follow him: With cloudless skies, the January weather was pleasant for warmly dressed people, but unbearably cold for a fly; Rupert would have frozen outside. When he had finally managed to regain his normal body without being seen, they had both disappeared, so he decided to lie in wait for them, again as a fly, opposite the Slytherin common room, where he waited in vain until evening.
It didn't occur to him that a very young couple wouldn't necessarily spend a Sunday afternoon in the common room.
On Monday, he got detention for falling asleep in Barclay's class, and then had to endure a rebuke from Anderson, who had provided him with a magic mirror for contact and was not very pleased with the results – or the lack of such – of his investigation.
Tuesday also passed without results, and it was not until Wednesday – by now it was 31st January – that an opportunity arose. He had hastily wolfed down his dinner, then transformed again and made himself comfortable on Roy's robe while he sat at dinner.
"Back in the secret room later," he heard Roy say in a low voice to the other Incorruptibles. "Albus, you go ahead again and make sure that we are not seen, then Julian, Orpheus and Ares will come, Arabella and me being the last."
Secret room! flashed through Rupert's mind. Now it was getting exciting!
Albus had withdrawn to a side passage near the secret room and was kneeling to study the Marauder's Map. The fact that his father's Invisibility Cloak had been confiscated by the Ministry was a bit annoying. Until December, he had simply been able to stand in the long corridor from which a small branch led to the broom closet, behind whose side wall the secret room was hidden, and read the map comfortably under the Invisibility Cloak. Now he had to use an Invisibility Spell for himself, but to put the map visibly on the floor, because in his hand it would also have become invisible.
Orpheus, Ares and Julian were already through, he was just waiting for Roy and Arabella. Finally he saw them coming, but ... That wasn't possible! He stared at the parchment. A third name was to be read close to Roy's, a name that did not belong here at all!
Albus raised his wand. Roy, Arabella and the uninvited companion were only a little more than twenty metres away.
"Calorate!"
Albus jumped to his feet and peered in the direction the three were coming from. Only Roy and Arabella, strolling down the corridor hand in hand, were to be seen, no trace of a third person, and that could only mean one thing ...
Albus reacted immediately: "Discalorate!" He now had a clear view again.
Still invisible, he walked towards the couple.
"Stand still and don't move," he murmured to the two, who recognised his voice and obeyed. Albus saw the fly on Roy's shoulder and pointed his wand at it. He could not see the wand himself, only feel it. His heart was pumping hard and fast. Hopefully he was aiming right, hopefully he didn't hit Roy ...
"Petrificus totalus!" he whispered. The fly that had just been rubbing its forelegs froze in mid-motion. Albus breathed a sigh of relief and made himself visible.
"Can you tell me what you are doing?" asked Roy frowning.
Instead of answering, Albus used his wand to wipe the fly from his robe onto his left hand and held it under Roy's nose.
"Know who it is?"
"A fly, and it didn't introduce itself to me."
"You know it." His grin widened. "It's Rupert Wilkinson from the Gryffindors. He's an Animagus."
With his mouth open, Roy stared first at Albus, then at the fly. "How do you know?"
Albus was about to reply when Arabella intervened:
"Stop," she said, "he can't move, but he can hear us. Roy, do you have any vessel with you in which we can stow our guest?"
Roy took an empty flask out of his pocket, into which Albus now slipped the fly.
"Put it down somewhere," Arabella said, "then we can talk."
Albus moved with the bottle a few yards further to the door of the Potions classroom, opened it with "Alohomora", placed the flask on a table, closed the door again behind him when he left, picked up the map and returned to the others.
"I spotted his name on the Marauder's Map," he said quietly, showing them the map. "Since he did not become visible even with Calorate, he had to be a very small Animagus. My dad told me that the map even lists Animagi under their plain names."
Roy let out a low whistle of admiration. "If you ever become an Auror, criminals will have a hard life! Your dad will be proud of you. Your mother, too, of course, for we are going to tell her! A son like you is what I'd like to have, too. Do you think," he asked Arabella with a grin, "we get one of this kind?"
She laughed. "I'd love to!"
In the secret room, the other Incorruptibles and Ginny, who had brought the new Firebolts and the Darkness Powder, had been worried because the three of them had kept them waiting for so long. Roy told them what had happened. Indeed, Ginny looked at her son with pride.
"I can't imagine," Roy added to his report, "that Wilkinson is able to make himself an Animagus. Someone was helping him, and that someone certainly was not McGonagall."
"He's an MSO spy, what else," Ares stated. "What are we going to do with him now? Lock away?"
Roy shook his head. "If a student goes missing, and at that a student from whom MSO is expecting reports, we'll have a hundred Aurors on our backs tomorrow. We could wipe his memory of the last hour or even the last few days, let him go and keep a permanent eye on him using the Marauder's Map. Annoying, but doable. There's nothing better I can think of at the moment."
"I think I've got an idea," said Orpheus. "We could use him to feed Anderson false information."
The idea was definitely appealing. Everyone was silent and thinking.
"And what kind of information do you have in mind?", Ginny finally demanded.
"For example, that we are not planning to free Harry at all, but just to picket the Ministry or something like that."
"Hmmm..." pondered Roy. "I'm seeing two problems: Firstly, he knows that he's been uncovered and will therefore suppose we are trying to fool him. Secondly, the information we give him must match what the Ministry already knows, otherwise Anderson will mistrust him. And we don't know what they know."
"But we could at least find out," Ares interjected, "what Wilkinson told them."
"How are you going to do that?"
"We'll ask him."
Everyone stared at him.
"Why would he tell us that?" asked Ginny. "Are you going to torture him?"
"Yuck, how primitive!" grinned Ares. "No, we just order him to tell us the truth." And since the others still didn't understand: "We simply use the Imperius Curse. Then we don't depend on him to believe us, we just tell him to pass on the information we give him."
Enthusiasm would have looked different, but no one had a better idea.
"Good," Roy finally said. "I'll do it."
"Didn't you promise someone not to do Dark Magic?" asked Arabella pointedly.
"What's left for me to do? It's a matter of life and death for Harry, and I'm not going to send one of the others ahead to do something I don't wanna do myself."
Arabella leaned towards him and hissed: "You know that Dark Magic can be addictive! Your mother died of an addiction, and you don't know if you inherited her disposition!"
She had spoken in such a low voice that the others couldn't understand, but Ares intervened of his own accord:
"Leave it, Roy, I'll do it! I've practised the Unforgivables, you haven't. It wouldn't make sense for you to do it."
"You practised that?" asked Ginny, horrified.
"Only on lower animals, of course, that is, spiders and the like, but yes, I practised it on my own after your husband refused to teach us."
"He had good reasons for that!"
"I don't think those reasons are good enough," Ares countered sarcastically, "that he would go to the scaffold because of them, right?"
Ginny bit her lips but remained silent.
Now Orpheus said: "I suggest, Roy, that you create a second secret room. Does it take you long?"
"I can do it in a jiffy," Roy said, "but what for?"
"The first piece of information we ask him to give Anderson is the location of this fake secret room. I've been worrying about that for a long time: If this room, our real secret room, is uncovered, the Aurors could find out that Apparating is possible here, unlike in the rest of Hogwarts. And then McGonagall gets into trouble. Besides, we can then use this second room for Wilkinson's interrogation right away."
It wasn't hard to find an old storage room some distance away, but still in the basement, to which Roy conjured a magically enlarged secret side room. Albus picked up the flask with the fly and let the fly slide to the floor. He raised the wand.
"Realocorpo!" he shouted, and in front of them lay Wilkinson, still immobilised.
"Imperio!", Ares now added and then lifted the Petrificus.
Wilkinson looked slightly stoned when he straightened up.
"Hullo Wilkinson," Ares growled.
"Hello Macnair," Wilkinson replied gently.
"You will now truthfully tell us everything you know. First: How did you become an Animagus?"
Wilkinson readily answered all the questions he was asked. So the Incorruptibles learnt everything: from the eavesdropping in the Room of Requirement, to the letter and the conversations with Anderson and Hermione, about which they questioned him particularly thoroughly, to his shadowing efforts over the last few days and what he had reported to his supervising officer so far.
When they believed he had said all that was worth knowing, Ares pointed his wand at Wilkinson again:
"Stupefy!"
The red flash shot into Wilkinson's chest and he slumped down unconscious.
"Ares!" cried Ginny. "Did it need to be so brutal? We'll wipe his memory later anyway, so he might as well have listened."
"No memory spell is one hundred per cent reliable," Ares replied brusquely. "What he doesn't know, you don't need to wipe. And compared to what that bastard would deserve, it wasn't particularly brutal."
"I also think," Roy said, "that there are more urgent things to be done now than to discuss mildness or brutality towards police informers. What he has told us is extremely disturbing, even more threatening than I had feared: Anderson knows positively that we are going to free Harry from Azkaban, and the only reason he hasn't had us, James and Victoire arrested yet is because he wants to find out through us who else is involved in the operation. Once he no longer has any hope of finding out, our ass is grass. So his source has to keep bubbling at any price, but always in such a way that he keeps believing there's something important he doesn't know yet."
Orpheus mused, "What if we persuaded him that we had dropped the goal to free Harry, and instead ... well, picketing is too harmless, he'll never believe that, but – yes, we plan to make an attempt on Hermione's life instead and speculate that her successor would release Harry of his own accord? But it would have to be made clear to him that we are only the hands, the real unknown masterminds behind the scenes being somewhere else? For example, in the Ministry and maybe even among the Aurors?"
Everyone looked at Roy. He grinned wider and wider and finally even giggled a little: "Orpheus, you are a genius! Indeed! The attack is plausible because it would be logical. It would also be logical that he would only be the keystone of a conspiracy of highly placed persons. And since the only trail Anderson could use to apprehend the alleged conspirators would be us, he would have to leave us unmolested!"
He giggled even more boisterously. "Instead, he will turn the entire Ministry upside down, especially his own security organisation, suspect everyone and conduct dozens of interrogations. This will not only paralyse him and the machinery, but also create bad blood among his men."
Roy took a deep breath so as not to get swept away by his own euphoria. He looked at the still unconscious Wilkinson:
"So, my friend, from now on you only report what you are supposed to! All unwanted memories are wiped and replaced by others. However, a few have to be very precise ..."
Roy pondered for a moment, then looked up. "We do play a comedy for him. It doesn't matter whether he himself believes it, but only that he can report in detail and has real memories, in case Anderson has the idea of penetrating his memory. This comedy is played by Ares, Julian, Orpheus and me. Ginny, Albus and Arabella, you won't take part."
"Why not?" called Albus indignantly.
"Albus," Roy said, as if saddened by the younger boy's obtuseness, "we're talking the head of the Magical Security Office into thinking we're planning an attack on the Minister ..."
"But Roy," Ginny exclaimed excitedly, "that's madness! You accuse yourselves of being terrorists, and to Anderson of all people!"
"That's exactly the brilliant thing," Roy grinned. "He will never believe that someone can be so crazy, and therefore he will not think it possible that it is a misinformation invented by ourselves! He will believe anything and it will distract him from Azkaban! Of course, it's risky, and that brings me back to your question, Albus: He probably won't arrest us because he still wants to get more information, and we will keep stalling him until your father is acquitted or we have freed him. But if he does arrest us, as many as possible should remain at large. Your mother has not been on his screen so far, and I want to keep it that way. You and Arabella are on his screen, but he will consider it plausible that we don't involve the only girl and the only first-year in the group in such an action. It is equally plausible that you are not involved in an attack on your aunt or even know about it. For this same reason, he will also believe that James and Victoire know nothing about it, and in this way, we elegantly get them out of the line of fire as well. This means that at least the five of you will remain unmolested, even if they arrest us. And there's one more reason why you must not be involved under any circumstances."
As Albus looked at him questioningly, Roy continued: "Anderson knows you have the Marauder's Map. What he obviously does not know is that Animagi are visible on it, otherwise he would have warned Wilkinson about it. But Hermione knows, doesn't she?"
Ginny answered in Albus' place: "Of course she knows, and has known since she was thirteen."
Roy nodded. "And this means we've got a problem: As soon as Hermione finds out that you have the map, she will know that Wilkinson has no chance of getting close enough to spy on us without being noticed. If I hadn't made that stupid mistake," he mused, furious of himself, "to do without the Calorate in the Room of Requirement, he wouldn't have found out anything, in any case we could have wiped his memory – well, there's no point in getting angry about it now. In any case, Hermione will wonder about his detailed reports. So we have to make her believe that you have the map but we haven't anymore. So we'll be upset in Wilkinson's presence that you are keeping the map for yourself."
Albus nodded slowly. "Now that you explain it like that, I see the point."
"Good," Roy said, looking at Wilkinson with grim satisfaction, "now let's think carefully about what information we're going to palm off on Anderson ..."
[Author's note: Dear reader, as you haven't stopped reading my story so far, I suppose you like it. Please consider marking it as a favourite or leaving a review.]