"What the hell is this?" Harry asked, getting into the meeting where someone had a wireless on. It seemed that a few of them were out searching for evidence of Rookwood's proclivities.
"I mean, I know I've still got a lot to pay for, but I'm glad I got out when I did." It was Ron's voice.
"How are they doing this?" Michael asked. "It should be impossible to make him betray us like this."
"My guess is that they're making him believe that he's in a training exercise or something. They're taking snippets of his words with the Voice Movement spell and putting that into a wireless. They can get him to say things, and then manipulate the context, and then show that to the public."
"So, they don't have any information out of him?"
"They're waiting to see if we move the Horcruces," he ventured. "So far, we haven't taken the bait, but if they knew where we put them, the recruit who works there would have checked and notified us."
"We have a deep cover agent?" Blaise asked.
"We do, but what's left of the Death Eaters probably has someone waiting to see if there's any sudden exit from the facility, and that's assuming they know where it is. Most likely, they don't, because they haven't gotten anything from Ron. They know that if they push him, he'll just die."
"He might have died already."
"I wouldn't be so optimistic," Harry said, shaking his head. "He's probably under a powerful Confunding Charm or he'd have realized how his words could be misused and he'd have kept his mouth shut. When Hermione wakes up, we'll have to be sure to tell her that it's not her fault for the way she crafted the curse on the document. There's really no way that she could have predicted this sort of thing, and we probably would have all been dead by now if it were any more restrictive." He looked back at the wireless. "There's nothing to be gained by listening more."
"What if he's trying to tell us something?" Neville asked after a moment. "What if, at some level, he does realize that his words are being broadcasted, but he's trying to tell us how to find him, if his words ever reach us?"
"Voldemort would have seen through something like that," Harry promised. "Is Ginny out on the mission?"
"Yeah, why?"
"If you want to listen to everything he's saying and discern if there's any kind of coded message, then I'll leave you to it. Be sure to write everything down. We're going to be doing something else, though."
"What's that?"
"I've had you two on public relations, in a sense, since we decided to announce our existence. Maybe we're suffering from the consequences of not mentioning that Ron had been captured earlier, but it wasn't a bad idea. I trust you and your judgement on the situation. What's most important for the public right now?"
"There's a lot of people that will abandon us," Blaise said after a moment. "Good riddance, honestly. The ones who just wanted to kick everyone else while they were down lost interest in taking sides back when the Prophet article came out. "What people who seriously care about all this will notice, though, isn't what someone is saying about us, but what we're doing. If there's anything I've learned about tricking and manipulating people's perspectives is that it's limited. There's only so much you can do before you have to get down to work."
"I have to agree," Michael said. "The thing to do now is round up regular criminals. We're not really investigators and we've got no legal authority, but if we hunt for missing persons, we'll at least be credited for it. Right now, there's a gang that's taking over the Isle of Man, and they're taking advantage of the fact that the Ministry has its hands full with Secrecy issues."
"They haven't learned their lesson, then," Harry said. "We'll take care of it."
"If we keep taking care of it, they won't learn anything."
"That's possible, but we don't really have any other option, as usual."
They apparated and found themselves on a brushed cliffside hill with a lonely tower, probably intended for looking out for ships. Tracking down a gang would mean looking for magical responses for basic detection spells, but they would also have to look into the local wizarding community. Michael had only a little more information than what he had revealed so far.
"Most likely, they're opportunists, not really hardened, violent criminals, but they're dangerous and they'll fight if they see that it's just a few of us."
"The Ministry might act like we've confirmed that we can manipulate time if we actually find this group and turn them in," his other subordinate said, thinking ahead as ever. "They could say that about anything, though."
The town of Lorelei Rock was basically the only magical settlement on the island and it was well-hidden, not that anyone was looking for it most of the time. There had been no official announcement, but there had been rumors that the children of members of the council had been kidnapped and taken hostage, and the first order of business had been to suppress any press releases. The council that governed all witches and wizards on the island had made an official statement that there was nothing going on that they could not themselves handle.
"It's like everyone here is sharing a secret," Blaise said as he looked around. "From the looks of it, they're not allowed to leave town. That's probably where the kids are being kept."
They spoke to a young man that they could separate from a group and confirmed most of their suspicions. Basically, it was a small town with a tight-knit community and no one thought anything of it for as long as anyone could remember that the kids all went to the same primary school. In the thousands of years that there had been a town there, no one had ever tried to hold the kids hostage from the school, because all their kids were there together, before they all went to Hogwarts together. The young wizard was certain the criminal had to be an outsider who found out about the school and saw it as a vulnerability.
"There's no guarantee of that," Harry said. "You could say the same thing about Hogwarts and the Death Eaters and the Ministry have been trying to control that place as long as they've existed." He took a breath. "At the same time, though, you might be right. Unless this were some well-guarded secret, and it wouldn't be if it didn't occur to anyone that a criminal would take advantage of it, then sooner or later someone else should find out."
"There are normal crimes here, right?" Michael asked.
"Well, a few here and there. It's mostly domestic. No matter how nice the community, you can't ever get rid of those issues. It's just that the kids were always off-limits. If you grew up going there, you knew you were safe and happy. It was like a work of art; you just assumed no one would ever ruin it."
"Was there a ransom letter?" Blaise asked.
"They said that some of the kids were transported elsewhere and the rest were still in the school, still learning if we're meant to believe that or not." He shrugged. "Most of the parents don't know what to do because they don't know whether their kids were transported away or still in the school. The demand is just that we pay an amount of gold to a dead drop location every day. They check extensively if anyone is waiting for them there before they show up. If they even think there's a trick, one of the kids dies."
"How long is it now?" Harry asked.
"It's been three days."
"Manageable." He turned to the others, letting their informant go on his way. "We'll use the Time Turner."
"The point of this was to get credit for saving the kids and then-" Blaise shook his head. "At least we should get them once they've actually done something or the Ministry will have nothing to do with them."
"We can use the Time Turner to spy on their planning phase," Michael said. "If we know where they're keeping the kids, then we could rescue them without the ones at the school finding out about it. We would just go after them next before they figure out what's going on."
"Not everyone has a planning phase where they sit around and figure out every detail like we do," Harry said, shaking his head. "I don't know what evidence there would be as to where they might have planned all this."
"Well, that part's easy, we just have to figure out who did it, and then go to their houses. We can figure out who did it if we figure out how the information got out."
"It's not that it got out," Blaise said. "It was technically public information. You just had to know someone who lived here or visit the place on business once. Someone could have sat on the information for years."
"That's not what the wanted poster seemed to imply."
"The wanted poster? Where did you see one?"
"I thought you saw it as well." He pointed at a building across the street where there was a magical photo of a young woman who was smiling, which looked out of place with the graffiti around the poster. The description only said 'information leaker, reward negotiable'. There was no graffiti on the rest of the building; it was all dedicated to calling her nasty names.
"This could be a false lead that the culprits put up themselves," Harry said, reading some missive about how the wanted witch had put all their children at risk. "It could also be something they put up looking for one of their own enemies."
"Either way, wouldn't be we able to find out who put it up if we just asked someone?"
"Even if someone saw a council member putting it up, they're the ones being held responsible for what happens to the kids. It wouldn't be strange for them to participate in some scheme naming a scapegoat."
In the middle of his saying as much, someone stopped by and shot them a look. They did not have to confirm with each other before going along with what the other person wanted and ducking into an alley. As happened frequently, the stranger stared at his forehead a moment.
"Harry Potter?"
"We're here to help."
"That witch is a teacher at our school. She's young, but she's well known as being good with kids. The only reason anyone has to suspect her is that she just started teaching last year."
"She wouldn't be the only one who would know, though," Michael said. "She also wouldn't have just found out how you did your schooling."
"She did, though," the old local said. "She only lived here as a baby and moved back because one of her parents died. It might have come up in conversation, but going here, and then almost immediately applying for a job was the first time she really saw the place."
"Are you saying you suspect her?" Blaise asked.
"Well... she could have had something to do with it. She worked so closely with the children that there might have been no way of avoiding it. Maybe she knows something. Either way she's gone now, and if she didn't know anything, what's the point of staying hidden?"
"She could just be buried under a rock or something," Harry said, getting annoyed with getting nowhere. It was frustrating enough that they had so little information, and then it seemed like everyone was inclined to waste time by promising more false leads. It would be much easier if he could just throw out everything unnecessary. Was that not how it always worked? "Wait, how do the parents here know that the kids haven't been killed?"
"We'd have to ask, I suppose," Michael said.
Apparently, they received gifts of hair whenever they made their tribute payment, as they learned from a distressed parent. It was always from a different kid, and basic magical testing confirmed that the kid was alive, or at least had been when the hair sample was cut. If they were even a moment late, the whole day would be skipped.
"That sounds..." Blaise shook his head. "I have to go speak with Hermione."
That left the two of them standing around alone for a moment.
"So, what's the plan for after this?" Michael asked. "How do you intend to turn this into some kind of reputation that's going to-"
"I don't want to hear about this-"
"Well, you might not, but this is what I was saying would happen. It won't matter if we do something to clean up our image. We should have just been building the recruits out into a proper army. What is it that we've done with all the recruits? We've basically just let them go, haven't we?"
"The recruits have transitioned into a neighborhood watch for their communities," Harry said. "We don't anticipate any more large battles because Voldemort has already exhausted most of his minions, as well as those his minions could drum up at a moment's notice. It's become effectively impossible for him to recruit going forward
"That doesn't mean there's no purpose to a standing army," Michael said. "What's to stop the Ministry from just getting rid of us the second they decide they can handle things without us?"
"The Time Turner. We're having people go back every hour of every day, remember?" He shook his head. "There's only so far we can push it, but they shouldn't be able to surprise us at least. I'll go ahead and admit that public opinion isn't reliable and it was never our goal to just hope that we stay in the public's good graces; the goal was to force the enemy to operate exclusively in the shadows. The recruits haven't exactly quit, either. They're more useful to us spread out all over the country. Even if all we have is that one of them disappears, then we'll know something happened."
There was a momentary silence before Blaise returned.
"For once my hunch was right," he said. "In order to avoid any chance of getting seen, they used a Switching Spell. I'm certain for nine parts out of ten. When we were using diagnostic spells, I was getting something weird in the distance, so I asked for a rundown of-"
"What's the point of making it so that no one was there, then?" Michael asked. "If the kidnappers weren't physically there, then why would they bother to make sure no one was hanging around when the switching spell gave them the tribute in exchange for the proof of life?"
"Well, in a pessimistic case, and there's no advantage we can gain from this, it's an abundance of caution, which is what I would do. They probably also left some kind of magical means of telling whether or not anyone was hanging around there- they need to know if anyone just decides that the kids aren't worth it anymore." He looked around and saw that his commanding officer was frowning. "Oh, come on, even in a tight-knit community, there have to be some people who don't have kids and also don't have a lot of gold to keep paying for them. The kidnappers could use this to find out if anyone was betraying the rest of the town by conducting a secret investigation, kill him while he's on his own, and then he'll take his secret to the grave. People would assume he just disappeared with his gold so it wouldn't be taken for the tribute."
"That's the pessimistic case?" Michael asked. "What's the optimistic case?"
"Well, there's a chance that they have no other choice, and they need to confuse their victims because there's actually a way of tracking them down waiting around during the exchange. One possible explanation is that the Switching Spell requires someone to be close by. Another is that it can be used to track down the location where the tribute is going."
"Not directly," Harry said after a moment. He had considered using it to hide the Horcruces after removing certain magical protections from them, so he had researched the vagaries of the spell somewhat. "A spell that simple, it's too quick, even if you're waiting for it. If you know what they're doing, though, you can get them."
"How's that?"
"Well, first we'll need the approval of the council, or at least one of their members."
It was not hard to find the council member when not at work; apparently they were well-known about town, and though they lied to the international community, they had done so only for the safety of the children who would otherwise have been killed by the kidnappers. Perhaps it was the path of least resistance, but it was one they took with domestic support. He was surprised by what they were suggesting, but heard them out.
"Very well," he said after a moment. "That kind of risk is one I imagine the people would be willing to take, if they knew. We can't allow you to have a hand on the tribute, as we were told it was being watched, but we can accomplish the same thing. What will you do once you have one of their members?"
"We'll get the information out of him before the others realize he's gone," Harry said. "Leave the rest of the details to us."
"I... I suppose I must. As long as the kidnappers have not seen you, they should not know why you are here at least..."
Hours later, a man in a green robe appeared right in front of them in an empty field.
"Expelliarmus." His wand flew out of his hand.
"Good thinking, Harry," Blaise said. "This saves time. We can question him without having to knock him out." It was about two or three levels of sarcasm.
"I keep telling you; it's a useful spell."
"You fools," the kidnapper managed, going for his wand only for Michael to summon it.
"I think you're the fool," he said. "You're the one who grabbed a galleon that we turned into a portkey. I guess after so many tributes you don't really check every single coin to make sure."
"The islanders have already been informed that if one of us dies or disappears, the hostages will all be killed."
"Well, maybe, maybe they won't want to lose their leverage. Maybe the others didn't like you that much anyway," Harry supposed, having selected a few pretexts to stand in for the Time Turner. "I think you should be more worried about yourself than what your mates might be doing to the hostages. Tell us where they are, and your suffering will be shortened."
Blaise used a severing charm to cut off a toe. It was going to be much harder not to use the Cruciatus, or the Imperius, for that matter, but those were the breaks of eschewing dark magic as an organization, and so far, it seemed to be paying off. Ginny felt better than ever before and the group reported greater internal trust. The rest of the mission, he assumed, would be a bit of a headache, but as Michael had said, now that they had a captive of their own, the details were basically already worked out, so all that was left was to take care of it and get on their way. It seemed unlikely that the Isle of Mann would have another kidnapping scandal for a while, not after the public had been forced to pay out so much gold, and he expected that not all of it would be returned. The real tragedy, though, would probably be about the island never quite enjoying the same public trust again.
In between the screams of the kidnapper, he quietly decided he would have to ask about the wanted poster for the information leaker. Most likely, the people would be better off knowing if that whole thing had been real or not, though they would still lose a little trust in each other either way.
