Chapter Title: Chapter 79 Part ONE
Author's Notes: First off, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to everyone!
Second, if you can, please go support me on or find me on Facebook Sarah Jaune
Third, very important, thank you Arnel for beta'ing!
Fourth, holy crap this story is long... leave a review okay? This is a behemoth lol
Chapter 79
Harry didn't have the time to spend watching Nat and Rick try to figure out their magical abilities. He didn't have the time to devote to sitting around while they compared notes and attempted different things. He didn't have the time to do much of anything. He was the Head Auror, in charge of an entire department, and Isabella Crabbe was not their only proverbial 'bad guy' on the loose in England. He had so many irons in the fire that it sometimes felt like he was being pulled in five hundred different directions.
He'd directed Teddy to keeping Nat safe. Al hadn't liked leaving Nat alone with Rick, but his son was still in training and training took priority. He couldn't keep pulling Al away or the other trainee, Lena, would start to wonder why. It looked like favoritism, even though it was anything but.
"Talk to me," Harry said as he barged into Hermione's office with a mild headache brewing and a bad temper to go with it.
She didn't talk to him, simply handed him a scroll for him to read. She probably did that on purpose, knowing it would annoy him the most. But no… that wasn't Hermione's way. He read through the reports they were getting and saw, as he'd feared, that several Muggles had been tortured in their flat just outside London.
All the Muggles were stuck at home, of course, and unable to leave or even get help. They were easy targets and some wizards had definitely decided to take advantage of that. "Bugger it all to hell," Harry swore as rage wanted to swamp them. "They're alright?"
"Yes," Hermione said quietly. "The neighbors heard something and called for the Muggle police, who showed up and it was enough to scare off whomever attacked them. They've already been treated at St. Mungo's and had their memories wiped. We had the scene cleaned as quickly as possible. I know you normally like to see these for yourself, but we couldn't risk it with the pandemic raging. We had to get the Muggles out quickly."
He let out a long sigh and nodded. "I'll assign someone to the case," he told her as he glanced towards her window, which wasn't a window at all, of course. It reflected his mood perfectly as a gray sky and heavy clouds appeared in the sky. In reality, of course, it was blisteringly cold outside just then but the sky was as blue as a sapphire in the sun. No one felt right about enjoying the view when so many were dying.
"Harry," Hermione said quietly, "I'm going to be working with Rose, Nat, and Rick in about an hour."
He nodded. He'd heard as much. "Maybe you'll make some progress with them."
She shrugged her shoulders and she looked, just then, about as run down as he felt. "Maybe we will and maybe we won't, but I do know that we have to keep trying. I am grateful my parents can live with us and that they're safe, but it's a blessing most don't have and this needs to end soon."
"I know," Harry assured her quietly. "You're saying we need to catch Crabbe so she stops doing all these stupid things that keep us chasing our tails."
Hermione, his sister in all but blood, held out her hands. "That's not going to happen. She's just too well protected and I'm hearing noises from the Muggle world that a vaccine is about to come out. That will be her, of course. Oh, it's terribly expensive, just now, but it will get cheaper," she told him as the scorn and sarcasm dripped out. "I don't know what she put in that vaccine, but I'm sure it will cure the Muggles… then I don't know what it will do afterwards." She leaned forward. "We need that vaccine."
Harry's brow rose and he considered her. "You want us to get someone to buy it so we can study it?"
"Yes," Hermione said simply. "We need someone, a well-connected Muggle, to get it for us. I've already spoken to the Minister about this, thinking it would be easy enough for the Muggle Prime Minister to get his hands on it, but she's not going for it. Susan has, rightfully, pointed out that the Muggle Prime Minister is quite busy at the moment and we really can't interfere."
Susan MacMillan was a good woman. She'd been a great leader, so far, and nothing had corrupted her, which Harry thought was practically a miracle, but she did have her limits. "Is she opposed to us trying?"
"No," Hermione assured him. "But we need a lot of money to do it and someone who has Muggle connections to get their hands on it."
It took Harry a moment to piece together just what she was asking for and it turned something in his stomach. "I see… you don't want to approach him about this yourself."
"I can't do it, Harry," Hermione told him quietly. "Rose barely speaks to me as it is and yes, I know I've done a lot to deserve that. I get it. If I ask her to put her husband at risk, I'm risking everything with her. If you ask her, she may still say no, but at the very least she isn't going to question your motives for asking."
Andrew was a duke. Andrew had buckets and barrels and castles full of money. Andrew would have the connections they'd need in the Muggle world to get their hands on one of those vaccines.
"But Crabbe is going to know he's not a Muggle," Harry pointed out to her.
Hermione shook her head. "We just need him to get someone to get it for us. That's all we need."
Harry considered his options as he went back to the Auror office to assign someone into finding the idiots who attacked the Muggles in London. It wouldn't be hard to do because, fortunately, most criminals were stupid and bragged about their crimes. This attack went to his department because of the nature of the attack, but it wasn't some dark plot, thankfully.
No, Harry had other dark plots and so he found his niece in the room they'd marked off for the work for Nat and Rick and asked Rose to come into his office.
Harry laid out the idea as though it was his own and that it had just happened to occur to him.
He thought, for a long, horrible moment, she was going to call him on his dragon dung, but she was clearly just as tired as he was because she accepted him at his word. "I don't know if he knows anyone," she admitted, "But I'll have him come talk to you later."
It was the best he was going to get, so Harry let it go and went to observe the progress with Nat and Rick, which amounted to not much of anything as far as he could see. The two of them were able to accurately describe the virus to Audrey, who was taking careful notes but as far as he could tell, they weren't any closer to coming up with a cure.
Andrew came and knocked at his door at nearly eight that night. He'd kept it propped open, as he was still working and they had only a skeleton crew of Aurors there, but he liked to keep the door open in case one of them needed something.
When he glanced up at the sound, he saw his niece's husband standing there in a Muggle suit and tie. "I was in Zoom meetings all day," he told Harry.
"What meetings?" Harry asked, his brow furrowed.
"They're video meetings over the internet," Andrew explained with a long sigh as he came in and sat down. "It's damned difficult to keep the laptop from being zapped by all the magic in our house, but we've managed to get one to work. Only while I'm on the video calls, it often shuts down."
"That would be annoying," Harry said as he tried to keep his amusement off of his face. It wasn't funny, not really, but Harry was so bloody tired, he was nearly punchy. "Who were you meeting with?"
"Various businesses," Andrew grimaced. "I happened to invest in several companies that are heavily involved in health care, so things are volatile right now. Rose came home and explained what you were looking for. I was going to come tomorrow, but she assured me you would still be at work."
Harry had to fight back the guilt of that. "It's a nasty habit all around, and if I had small children at home I'd be really beating myself up, but as it is, Ginny came to the office to have a quick supper with me before heading back home. Anyway, do you think you can get it?"
Andrew's mouth screwed up in obvious distaste, but he nodded. "It's her, Harry."
Harry froze for a moment. "How do you know?"
"Because," Andrew said on a long, bitter sigh, "The cure is coming out of Brazil and it's a company I've never heard of, but they're calling themselves Vincent Laboratories."
Harry stared at him, horrified and curious all at the same moment. "You… you're joking."
"I'm not," he assured Harry. "I was having an argument with my financial team all day about why we weren't going to invest with them. They were adamant that it was the best thing, but when I heard the location and the name, I knew it had to be her. How many times have we had to talk about Vincent Crabbe's death in the last several years? He's the catalyst for this whole mess. Then Rose came home right as I was arguing yet again, and the Floo shut off the laptop again. She explained what you were after while I was rebooting and I told the financial team that if they wanted my investment, I needed a sample of the vaccine to prove it works. I need the actual vial in my hand."
Harry shook his head. "She'll know if you're asking for it."
Andrew waved that off. "She isn't going to know anything. I'm well hidden behind several shell companies that would take a Muggle hacker months to untangle. Only a very select few even know it's me, and it won't be my financial team asking for the vaccine. It will be another team assigned by a separate team, assigned by someone else who reports to the financial team. This would be coming out of R&D money that one of my holdings would be offering to her."
"I only understood about half of what you just said," Harry admitted with half a grin.
"Basically, I have a lot of money and it's diversified into a lot of different pots to do different things to try to keep growing the money," Andrew explained as he sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "I don't want to be tied to all the money. If I am, it makes us a target in the Muggle world. If the Muggles think, 'oh that duke bloke maybe has a million pounds' then they're not going to think, 'let's kidnap his sister for ransom.'"
Harry considered him for a long moment. "It's been a long time since I was in the Muggle world, but when I was, a million pounds was a lot of money."
"It isn't a lot of money anymore, thanks to inflation," Andrew assured him with a slight shake of his head. "For someone who has an old estate, like I do, if you don't have that much you can't even keep the household running for a year. My dad was good at business, and he kept things going well, but it was starting to look like we were going to have to do house tours and rent out the estate."
"I'm sensing there is a major 'but' in there somewhere," Harry told him.
"But then my dad died and Bill came along side me to help me learn to manage the estate and all of my holdings," Andrew explained as he finally sat back. "No one talks about Bill's ability to manage money. He tells me he manages all the money for the family, but that it's all invested in the magical world. Well, my family was already invested in the Muggle world and Bill had been wanting to give that a go. It turns out he was good at it and when I took over, I realized I had a sense for it that was even better."
There was no bragging in Andrew. Harry had always marveled at that about the young man. Even when he was named duke, it was not something that he took excess pride in. Of course, he'd become the duke at the loss of his father, mother, and all his brothers. Only his sister had survived, and Harry knew Andrew would have given anything to get the rest of his family back. It simply wasn't possible, though, and he'd made the best of it. "You have a lot of money now?"
"I have a lot of money," Andrew said quietly. "I'll get that vaccine for you if it's available to be acquired."
That would have to be enough for now.
Harry left his meeting with Andrew to go to the Minister's office and let her know what Andrew had learned about the maker of the vaccine, then he went home to fall into bed and sleep for four hours before getting up to do it all over again.
It took Andrew three days to get his hands on the vaccine and when he had word that they'd be able to get it, he'd asked if Teddy would go in with the Muggle team, posing as Muggle security.
He'd hated to do it, but he sent his godson in and was rewarded with three vials of the vaccine to study. Audrey went to work on it immediately with Nat, Rose, and Rick. Rick was now on permanent loan from America, as Auror Kingston had already gone back to New York. They'd put Rick up with Al at the flat in Diagon Alley, since he didn't currently have a flatmate, and so far, his son hadn't killed the American teen, which Harry took to be a good sign.
"Anything?" Harry asked after the first day.
"We know this much," Audrey told him grimly. "Anyone who takes this vaccine is going to be very sorry. She's put magic in it and it's a nasty piece of work."
"It's some kind of very slow acting poison," Nat explained to him, her eyes sad and clearly exhausted. "It's along the same lines as what she gave to Ginny when she lost baby Hope, as near as we can tell," she said as Harry's insides went cold. "But the vaccine itself does work on the virus that's killing people now. I've separated the poison from the vaccine part and we're trying to work out how she did that now."
"Do we know how long it would take the poison to kill someone?" Harry asked, glancing between them.
It was Rick who answered. "No clue, but slowly," he told him.
"That's really the best we can say at this point," Audrey agreed sadly. "We know it's in testing which means they will want to see how people do. It's already too late for some people unless we can get ahold of the test subjects and cure them."
"I'm working to teach Rick how to do that," Nat added quickly. "It's not as easy for him to do, but we're making progress. Al keeps coming in to volunteer after he's done with training."
Harry was sure that Al was not coming in to volunteer to train Rick, but to keep an eye on him. Still, Harry kept that bit to himself. "Alright," he said as he tried not to pace. "Keep me posted."
They were going to have a problem on their hands if that vaccine went live in Muggle communities, but currently most of the governments were making it go through safety testing. Primarily it was the Americans they were looking towards to get approval with their CDC or whoever it was that tested the things.
Harry went back to his office and contacted Louis Kingston and told him what they'd learned so far. It was never comfortable kneeling on the ground to communicate via fireplace, but it was quick. He watched Kingston's face harden as he nodded. "I'll get our president to contact the Muggle president. Can you get Audrey to work up some fake paperwork showing the poison?"
Harry hesitated for only a moment and then nodded. "I'll get something to you as soon as I can."
He didn't go straight back to Audrey, but went to find Hermione who would be able to fake Muggle documents easily, as it was something she regularly did. "I have a contact at our health office here in London," she assured him. "I met him back during the last pandemic. I can get the documents to him and he can send them over to the Americans. If the Americans say it's unsafe, at least two-thirds of the world will stop human testing which is what we need. We need to buy more time."
"I need to update the Minister and then I'll let Kingston know to expect the test results to come from the Brits," Harry said as he made his way towards the Minister's office.
By that evening in London, they'd managed to alert the world to the problem with the vaccine. Thousands had already been injected into arms and all of those people were going to need to be treated, but they had time for that. It turned out to be a complicated, but well studied poison that any Potions Master could deal with. That left Nat free to continue dealing with the actual virus and the vaccine that did work and not with putting out fires that the vaccine trials had started.
Things were, quite possibly, looking up.
~*~
"What do you mean they've stopped the trials?" Isabella Crabbe asked quietly as her second in command stood in her office overlooking the Madeira River in the town of Porto Velho.
"They found the poison," the massive man explained bluntly.
"There is no way they could have found the poison that quickly," Crabbe insisted coldly. "It was well concealed and would not have become a problem for at least a year."
The man, never one to speak when he didn't have to, shrugged.
Fury filled Crabbe's chest as she quickly considered her options, knowing none of them were good. "Who, exactly, found it?"
"The Americans," he told her. "They released the press brief on their picture box."
And it was then that Crabbe knew that the American boy must have seen the poison. "We need to kill that kid."
The man waited. They'd already tried. It hadn't gone well. He didn't say it, but Crabbe didn't need him to say it.
She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She'd been counting on the money they would make from the vaccine. She could, of course, release the vaccine without the poison, but really what was the fun in that? She could kill off all the Muggles while she damaged all the magical people. Who wouldn't want to hit two birds with one stone?
Sighing heavily, she turned back to the man. "Tell them we've found the impurity in the vaccine and we will be remaking it without it."
"You want us to remove the poison?" he asked her, a look of surprise on his face.
"I want the damn money!" she shouted at him, banging her fist. "Have that bloody fool we hired call the Americans and tell them we found the problem. Tell them to scrap the first batch and we will have more ready to go in a few weeks. Then tell the potions masters to make it correctly this time."
"Alright," he said and he left.
One way or another she was going to get the money she needed to continue her plan. It hadn't gone the way she'd wanted so far, but soon enough the Potter brat would be dead. She hadn't been seen in public in months and that, at least, was sweet enough revenge.
For now.
~*~