41

Chapter 41: Three geniuses and a diaryNotes:

Good morning everyone, here is this week's chapter. Another round of "what was Albus Dumbledore up to the past two years", but we're coming closer and closer to the final (this time for real) confrontation, I won't be dragging it out much longer. I hope that you'll enjoy reading this chapter

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It hadn't been easy for Dumbledore to find the two escaped Death Eaters, even with Gareth's dossiers and information, but he tried his best, which led to him having no time to work on the book. Gareth was still trying his best too, continuing tracking down properties either of the two could have bought under an alias and checking his sources, but in the end it was Albus who found them.

Just a few weeks back he had created a rather rudimentary pensieve based on the notes he had made in the MACUSA archives from Franklin's notebooks to check his memories. Once upon a time he had read through all Death Eater files, and now he revisited the memory from reading Augustus' file where he saw the huge amount of vacation time and his travel records. Combined with the declassified essays about energy lines Albus guessed that he had been travelling around the world to check those spots, and at some point he returned, put the topic ad acta and took huge amounts of vacation time whenever he could. 

It wasn't too hard to get a map of the biggest energy lines and their crossings, and instead of visiting every single big one, Dedalus was tasked with looking through the muggle records, mainly the more secluded ones, and indeed, they found an interesting purchase around the right time, in the middle of nowhere in Norway.

And so Albus Dumbledore made his way to Norway, again under his assumed identity (seemingly the Americans had believed his little trick and no one had uncovered the memory modification, so the alias of Richard Harris was still usable), and he entered Augustus' gigantic property in the middle of nowhere. Now that explains where all the funds went the DMLE couldn't find after his arrests.

He had nearly missed the faint ward around the whole property (several square kilometres), detecting entering magicals, but since he was looking for a former Unspeakable, he was on the lookout for that. 

So when he found the castle under all its wards, he just walked up to it, elegantly surpassing all the wards (he was pretty skilled) and just knocked on the door.

Obviously, that had been a great success, as now he was back at Nurmengard with the two of them and ready to get started with the book. Nathaniel was a brilliant man too, and even though he had no idea of this particular encryption, he learned quickly from him and Augustus. The former Headmaster and the former Unspeakable estimated that they would need about a year if all three of them could work at least six hours per day on it, which was already magically taxing, and then probably a week or two to break the normal encryption. While that wasn't ideal, Albus had expected and estimated that by himself, and he could use the time to strengthen his alliances, maybe get some more ties into Britain. Abbott still wanted to meet, and Macmillan would probably follow quickly afterwards. Elphias eldests son, Lord Doge, would be a strong ally too, that much was clear, so he would invite them here eventually. 

The new Lords Crabbe and Goyle were part of the council too, though only unofficially for the time being, McLaggen was still a staunch supporter, and the spies he could get into Hogwarts told him that no staff was loyal to him anymore, but Ronald Weasley was still on his side. Him and Molly Weasley, who was still in Azkaban, which was much stronger protected than ever before. The twins were brilliant students, Percy a great prosecutor and both Bill and Arthur high-ranking officials, and Ginny was still with mind healers but expected to make a full recovery and leave the whole "Mrs. Ginny Potter" nonsense behind. Only Ronald would be loyal, he was staying quiet and didn't draw any attention while focussing on his schoolwork, probably to stand up to Potter one day. 

So his position wasn't too bad, and if he could get to Lady Parkinson and Lady Malfoy, he could get the remaining dark side proxies and heirs behind him via them. But not now, the book had priority.

On one of these days where Augustus was cursing about ancient wards, Nathaniel was shaking his head in disbelief of his alliance with Dumbledore and the old man himself tried to stay enthusiastic about the whole mission, Gareth walked into the office.

"Albus, Lord Macmillan just got here."

"Oh really? I did expect he'd need a day longer, but well. Offer him some tea and give me ten minutes to separate this nasty confundus ward from the lightning ward. Haven't seen the latter in years, quite a lightshow if you run into that one, one hell of an electrocution. And I still haven't figured out what the combination of these does aside from…ouch, don't shock me."

Augustus, trying to divide two protection wards and a withering curse ward into three separate pieces, shook his head.

"Maybe it makes you forget about the mild electric shock you get when coming near it, that's the fifth time you've been shocked."

"Seriously? How…ouch, what was that?"

Losing patience, Nathaniel flicked his wand and overloaded the confundus ward so Albus could take its cooldown time to disassemble the lighting ward.

"See! Gosh, I think these shocks aren't good for your brain, old man."

Dumbledore thanked him and left the office shortly after Gareth so he could redress (he wasn't wearing his fancy suit when working with wards after one of those burned a while back, but standard curse breaker robes) and then meet Lord Ernest Macmillan. 

"Ernest, old friend! How are you doing?"

The elderly man looked up, glad that the man he had corresponded with so much finally arrived, and was in shock. It sounded familiar, the way he got greeted, but he couldn't recognise the man.

"I'm sorry, do we know each other?"

"Oh, seriously? Dedalus only needed seconds to recognise me. I cut my beard and hair, am wearing new glasses and no longer flashy robes, and no no one recognises me anymore?"

"Wait…Albus? But you're dead?"

"Oh no, old friend, I'm not. I hear you named your political movement after me, care to let me in on the fun?"

After giving a very stunned Ernest Macmillan enough time to understand what was happening, Albus had to tell the tale of his escape.

"And what's your plan now? I hope that you'll assist us in taking down the Potter-Black-Longbottom-Greengrass alliance with all their votes, and Minister Bones too. They're going too far, and many of us believe that. The Veil for so many wizards and witches? And the muggleborns are getting too many rights. Besides, while I don't like violence against house elves too, they're going too far. And let's not forget the werewolf rights. There's a big difference between being less racist and being too inclusive of non-deserving creatures."

Oh, that was much better than Albus had imagined, they're completely supportive and absolutely unhappy with the current government.

"I have a plan."

"A plan? Come on, Albus, I'm already under oath."

"No, I can't, not yet at least. It might take me over a year, if not more, to be entirely successful so we can take down Potter. I'm working on it, and not alone."

"A year or longer? Seriously?"

"I'll keep supporting you financially and you work on getting the public on your side while I'll furthen my alliances too, and once I have what I need, we move against them. And come on, you don't have the political power to make a move now, don't complain."

Albus would have several of these discussions over the next few months, Lord Doge and Lord Abbott were a bit more helpful than Ernest Macmillan, but there were the less easy ones too. The new Lords Crabbe and Goyle were nearly unknown to him and had pressured the heirs of the main family to give up their titles. None of those were dark, but they were not easy to convince. And the hardest one was Lord McLaggen, a man that had been called the "Light Lucius Malfoy", though he was nowhere as rich or powerful as the Malfoy patriarch had been, just as arrogant. He was demanding full disclosure of Dumbledore's plans, an absurdly high financial support and the position of Minister of Magic when they had control of Britain. 

Well, he had to suffer in a small cell in Nurmengard for a week until he realised that he had no say in basically anything and was just a pawn to Albus Dumbledore.

Mid-June of 1995, just as Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts (a very boring one this time around, no Triwizard Tournament, no Voldemort rebirth and no attacks at the Quidditch World Cup) was slowly coming to a close, Albus, Augustus and Nathaniel were finishing up the last few entangled wards. It had been a long and exhausting year, but also an effective one. Shortly after Christmas Dumbledore had granted bringing Lady Alana Parkinson and her daughter in as they were on vacation in France. Sure, the realisation that her father was working with the apparently not dead Albus Dumbledore wasn't easy for Pansy (she might have insulted Dumbledore a few times, causing the old man to laugh in amusement), but eventually she accepted that her father was just trying to make their life easier again. While it was hard to understand that he wasn't as bigoted as the Malfoys for example, she tried to adapt to her changing world.

Sadly, this would be the only time they got to meet until now, because Pansy was still being homeschooled by her mother and tutors under ministry supervision, so the Christmas vacation (without wand) was the only way for the girl to leave the house unobserved by the ministry.

But a change to that was now so near as they just had to break the usual wards around the book, the entanglement was completely resolved. 

One and a half weeks later, on a Monday afternoon, all three of them nearly collapsed in exhaustion as the last remaining wards fell at once. They did it.

"Bloody hell, we did it."

After drinking some water and taking a breath, Albus opened up the book and started looking through the pages until he found an entry from late 1084 and began to read it out, though obviously under a translation spell.

The messengers of our magicals arrived the day before yesterday to inform me of the death of Lord Merlin Ambrosius, King Arthur's wizard. I had only met the man twice, but he was impressive.

Tall and with light grey eyes and a greying beard, a staff to walk with in his hand and his wand stripped to the wrist. He had performed the most unusual magics in my presence and told tales of Camelot Castle and Arthur's court. 

And now this great man is dead, and the wizards invite me to his funeral on the magical island of Avalon. They handed me a gem, a big ruby which would guide me. It had runic symbols all over it and even I could feel its power despite having no magic myself.

They brought me into the west of our island, somewhere along the coast, they said it was a place of importance for Arthur and that the quest to Camelot would start here.

The gem reacted just as they said it would and we were transported to the edge of a big lake or the sea, covered in fog, and a boat appeared.

When we entered the boat the gem glowed stronger and a magical melody was coming from the water as the boat started to move. 

After a while we reached an island, usually hidden from plain sight, or so they said, and here we put Lord Merlin to eternal rest. His wand in his hand and his staff by his side the wizards closed his coffin and carried it into a crypt, where they sealed the stone coffin.

Albus skipped over the parts of the ceremony, because now they knew that Merlin was indeed buried with his wand, and that it happened on the magical island of Avalon, that much was obvious from the descriptions.

After a few pages he found another interesting section.

When we left again, the wizards gifted me with the gem, they called it a Passage to Avalon, and I should look after it. If one went to the starting point of the quest, it would lead him to the island. I promised them that I'd keep it safe.

Now panicking as the section about the funeral stopped, Albus skimmed through the rest of the diary, hoping to find at least some clue. 

I gave the crystal to Avalon in the safekeeping of an old friend of mine until I shall get it back from him, Otho de Lagery, a French priest and current papal legate in the Holy Roman Empire. He'll look after it.

"And that's it, shortly after that he died, so we just need to find out who that priest was.

About a week later (their library hadn't had any information on the priest so they had to go visit a bigger public library) they knew who this french priest was - or would become. Pope Urban II. And if the books they consulted were correct, then all of his assets were in the Vatican.

A fact, which didn't make Albus Dumbledore really happy, because on this treasure hunt he already had to sneak something out of the MACUSA archives, now stealing a gem out of the Vatican was even worse, because despite having no wizarding community they were incredibly well protected.

This led to an immense amount of preparation, with all of them reaching out to contacts and getting a hold of blueprints, warding schemes or guard schedules. An old associate of Augustus - who had to be heavily bribed - even delivered a stolen ledger (a gemino spell copy of the original) listing the contents of the Magical Vatican Vaults. And with that they even had proof of the gem's location, because it said "Magical Vault 36, red ruby, engraved with runes, powers unknown. William the Conqueror to Pope Urban II, late eleventh century."

After a while of researching and getting intel, they were not so worried about that heist anymore, because the Magical Archives were not a subsection of the Vatican Secret Archive - a highly secured area, for both muggles and magicals. They had feared that the gem would end up somewhere, not being identified as magical and laying around in some sort of vault, but the ledger of the Magical Vaults had told them the truth. 

The issue then was to pinpoint the location of said vault, which wasn't on any of the ordinary maps (obviously), but over time they managed to get the details.

Before the fifteenth century, the magical artefacts hadn't been handled separately by the church, but that mindset slowly changed after the end of the Avignon Papacy. As they built the new Apostolic Palace they also built the subterranean Magical Vaults to store all these artefacts, with the intention of taking as many of those as possible out of circulation, both the biblical and the non-biblical artefacts, so no one could start theorising that the divinity was in truth just magic.

That's why they didn't let anyone enter the Vaults, those things weren't there for research purposes, but just to lock them away. Destruction was on the table once, but that would have been giving up leverage and potentially powerful weaponry.

But because no one really entered these vaults, not even the Vatican's own personnel, the very active black market with objects from there was never noticed by the officials - or at least by those that weren't part of the scheme. It was obviously a very secret market, just selling to known customers, so it was no big surprise that neither Albus, nor Augustus or Nathaniel didn't know about it and pointlessly planned a heist.

That would change one day, by now mid-November, since the "Operation Followers" and the "Operation Dumbledorians in Britain" were quite time-consuming as well, as Gareth, Dumbledore's old friend, came back from a recruitment mission.

Gareth had originally been a German (his name was obviously just an alias, one of many, and by now the accent was entirely gone too), who got swayed by Gellert Grindelwald back in the day, after a negative experience with muggles in his (then former) hometown. 

Originally he was a private tutor to magical children of wealthy families, his specialities being estate management, other business-related topics and formal duelling. As a side-job he began selling the business secrets of said families and started his gathering of intelligence as a potential source of blackmail while becoming proficient in all sorts of spying charms and combat magic (even aside from the formal duelling). When the muggle-incident happened (he didn't talk about what happened, but they chased him from their town) he developed a hatred towards them and allied himself with Grindelwald, using his skills to become his spy. And damn, he was the best one Gellert ever had.

But at some point he got doubts, because while spying and fighting were his talents and passions, he was not a fan of slaughter. A few years before Gellert's defeat, in the early forties - the situation in the muggle world making him want to leave even more - he was spying on Albus Dumbledore, the man who would save him. 

Unlike Severus Snape back in the day, Gareth was no "slave", and he was never forced into working for the old man, much the opposite. One day he revealed himself to the transfiguration professor after witnessing his magical skill from afar. And with the promise of not ordering him to kill people, and to work towards ending Gellert's reign of terror, Albus Dumbledore got a new follower.

He was not a conventional follower, and certainly not one that made his alliance public - ever. Under the guise of continuing to spy on Albus, Gareth stayed in Scotland for a major part of the time until Geller's downfall, and once that was over he went back onto the continent and became Albus' informant. And by the time of Voldemort's first uprising he was able to keep the "Leader of the Light" updated on followers coming from the continent as well as some business connections the Death Eaters had here. Due to some of his intel and subtle sabotage, he for example nearly ruined a whole importing business from Lucius Malfoy and he was behind getting some of Nott's contacts and associates arrested on a variety of (occasionally bogus) charges.

And because of all Gareth's efforts on the continent, Albus had - once he was "dead" in Britain - a complete network of spies, black market dealers, light sided fighters and businesses as well as proper funding at hand. 

But what was truly important now was the fact that Gareth had contacts into the Vatican black market, due to a very complicated situation with a wand made from wood of the cross of Jesus and a greek billionaire (and a bewitched, speaking, yellow octopus called Octavian, but that's besides the point). With that knowledge he could very well try to buy the gem for Albus, but due to security reasons (the old meddler was still a friend of secrecy) he didn't know what the "brilliant trio", as he called the "Leader of the Light" and the Death Eaters, was looking for.

That changed a few days after his return from a very successful recruitment mission in Magical Portugal, giving them access to the funds of the Lord of Magical Lisbon, when he came down into Gellert's hidden study, which the trio used for their research.

There he saw an object he had seen before, the ledger with the contents of the Vatican Vault, as well as some of the schematics.

"Albus, do you have time for…what are you doing? Don't tell me you want to break into the damn Vatican Vaults." 

"Uhm…"

Now Albus was unsure what to reply. Fill in his spymaster and strongest ally on his plans, or not? But why was he so furious.

"And what if we would want to?"

Gareth shook his head.

"Then I'd tell you that you're crazy, those are too heavily protected. And besides, I can get you nearly anything from in there on the black market - if you're willing to pay the price."

And the room was silent as all three men looked up and stared at the old spy.

"What?"

"Oh, one of the bishops controlling the Vaults has a flourishing black market, but it's damn hard to get in and all of it is rather secret."

"Do you have a way in?"

"Yes, but that's a long story. What do you need?"

Albus then showed his spymaster the ledger and told him which item - the gem - he wanted.

After a bit of conversation via a protean-charmed and warded communication stone, Gareth came back to Albus with an offer. 

"TWO MILLION GALLEONS?"

"Actually that's a rather good price, Albus, and you can have it probably tomorrow if we make the transfer today. But we might have to ask for a bit of funding from our British friends. We have the money, but spending that amount at once is bad for our other operations."

Albus sighed.

"Write Macmillan and offer him two percent interest for one and a half million galleons over the course of…two years? You're more familiar with our finances."

"I'll see it done, but he'll have more demands in the long run."

"I know."

Four hours and a few floo calls later, all the transfers were completed and the people behind the black market were two million galleons richer. 

A bishop, who in secret was a squib, made his way down into the Vaults through an entrance that his predecessor in the black market built. He wasn't magical, so the wards let him through without any problem, then he used his key to open the one Vault he was looking for, number 36. It was one of the bigger ones, filled with cursed and charmed gems and jewellery, including one of the ancient papal tiaras which a very ambitious wizard had once charmed with a compulsion charm that made the pope listen to said wizard's "suggestions".

What the wizards were looking for was a red gem with runes on it, originally from William the Conqueror. Its magical power was unknown, but it was theorised that it was of a symbolic or ritual nature. So…most likely not dangerous - not that this stopped him usually. 

The only things he didn't sell were the too obvious ones that could reveal the black market. Every pope was told about the vaults (every cardinal was made aware of magic, even most bishops knew of it) and of some of its contents, like the grail, the holy lance or Solomon's seal. Those things he obviously couldn't sell, even though dozens of people had already asked for it and offered horrendous amounts of money. 

He found the gem after just a few minutes of searching, checked to make sure it really was the genuine object and then put it in his bag (undetectable extension charm and ward protection on it) so he could meet up with his client. Those meetings happened outside of the Vatican near a public floo and were just done after the money was transferred.

The next morning the bishop met up with Gareth and handed over the artefact after having made sure that the transfer of money had happened.

And so Albus Dumbledore got a hold of the magical gem without having to break into the Vatican. 

Once he held the stone in his hands, he could feel the power coming from it, not too strong, but still there. A complex runic spell, and one that they probably couldn't break. It was a reusable portkey, as well as a "key" to enter Avalon. The portkey was location-based and activated automatically, so all he needed to do was to find the spot where it activated.

Now that was the next thing to work out. Where did it activate?