The Vault of Destinies (James Potter #3) (65 page)

There were footsteps just outside the study. A shadow moved on the partially open door. Without thinking, James dropped back onto the huge desk chair. The chair began to spin again and he clumped his feet to the floor, halting its movement. He stared furiously out the darkened window in front of him and held his breath.

The door swept open behind him, and James realized, with some bemusement, that he could see the entire room reflected in the high study window. The shape of the batwing chair blocked out a lot of the reflection, of course, but he could see the top of the door and indistinct shadows on the nearby bookshelves as someone entered the room, leaving the door wide open behind them.

"What would Dumbledore say?" the figure mumbled quietly, and James realized, with a mixture of relief and trepidation, that it was his father. Harry Potter had finally returned from his raid. He sighed quietly to himself, "Think, Potter. What would Dumbledore say? Or even Snape?" And then, in a louder voice, "In here, gentlemen. Close the door behind you, if you would."

Slowly, James hunkered lower in the black chair, keeping his feet planted firmly on the floor to prevent it from swiveling around and revealing him. More footsteps approached and in the window's reflection, James saw two more men enter the room. They wore the black suits and ties of the Magical Integration Bureau.

"I thought it best," Harry said, moving toward his desk and leaning on it, facing the men, "that we debrief immediately. Thank you for coming inside."

"We wouldn't have it any other way," one of the men said stiffly. The image in the window's reflection was somewhat distorted, but James recognized the man. He was the one they had first met outside the
Zephyr
after the crashing attack along the streets of Muggle New York. His name, James recalled, was Price.

"Well then," Harry began briskly, "it seems that our information was accurate enough. That is one good thing we can take from this evening's exercise. The W.U.L.F. is on the run. We can expect that they will be much clumsier now, having been routed from their headquarters."

"And this seems like a good thing to you?" Price said evenly. "I don't know about you, but I'd rather stamp out the whole nest of spiders at once than try to chase them one by one into the shadows. Wouldn't you, Espinosa?"

"I sure wouldn't call tonight a win for the good guys," Espinosa replied coolly. "They know we're onto them now. They'll be watching for us. No more element of surprise."

"We have eyes all over the city," Harry said. "Now that Tarrantus' agents are on the run, we will surely sense their movements. If we have to track them down one by one, then that's how we will do it. It wouldn't be the first time the Department of Aurors disassembled a network of dark wizards one brick at a time."

Espinosa commented, "Would've been a lot easier if we'd have been able to take Tarrantus alive."

"Sure would," Price nodded, and James could see that he was watching Harry closely. "I don't suppose you magical types have the ability to extract information from the dead, do you? No? That's a shame. And here we 'Muggles' all thought you were so much more advanced than that."

"Necromancy is a forbidden art," Harry replied. "Not that it was ever particularly accurate, even for those who excelled at it."

"Pretty convenient," Price countered. "Tarrantus being found murdered in his recently abandoned headquarters and us not being able to interview the deceased to find out where his people might have escaped to or what their plans were."

"No sign of the missing senator, either," Espinosa added reasonably. "
Very
convenient."

"Convenient for
whom,
exactly?" Harry said, and James heard the barely restrained anger in his voice. "Since I've been spearheading the international search for these villains, I can say that the lack of any prominent leads and the apparent murder of their leader is decidedly inconvenient. I had very high hopes that this whole mess would be concluded tonight, as you well know."

"So you keep saying," Price countered. "And yet there is no question that
somebody
alerted the W.U.L.F. to our raid only minutes before our arrival, giving them just enough time to escape. Not to mention the very damning fact that your name, Mr. Potter, was scrawled on the wall with the victim's own blood."

"A warning," Harry said stonily. "They want me gone, precisely because we are this close to capturing them. They've been attempting to thwart our attempts ever since they hired a fleet of pirates to sink us on the journey here. Tarrantus himself led the attack on the train and personally delivered the warning, telling us to leave immediately or face the consequences."

"And now, Tarrantus is lying cold in a wizarding morgue in downtown New Amsterdam," Espinosa nodded. "I mean, it
could
be that the name written in blood on the wall was a warning that you should give up and run home, Mr. Potter. But we cannot rule out that it might, in fact, have been the victim's way of identifying his killer."

"That's ridiculous, Mr. Espinosa, if you'll pardon me for being blunt," Harry said coldly, "even apart from the fact that I was with you at the time the man was killed. I've seen Killing Curses in action in my time. The curse that ended Tarrantus' life was not only brutal, it was instantaneous. He wasn't just killed. He was destroyed. I promise you, there were no final moments during which the man could have scrawled the name of his murderer on the wall in his own blood. Tarrantus was dead before he hit the floor and someone else wrote my name on the wall with his blood."

Espinosa asked, "And why would the W.U.L.F. have murdered their own leader only moments before their escape from our raid?"

"Perhaps for being sloppy," Harry suggested curtly. "After all, it was his own paper trail that led us to him. Organizations like the W.U.L.F. do not easily forgive such ineptitude."

"Could be," Price agreed reluctantly. "Then again, it could be that Tarrantus was getting ready to talk. Maybe he was getting cold feet about the organization's tactics and was planning on telling us everything he knew. Maybe someone else decided he was a threat and planned to overthrow him as leader. They'd have no choice but to kill him, of course. Whoever tipped them off about the impending raid, seems likely to me that that's the same person who's probably in charge now. What do you think, Espinosa?"

"Just makes sense," Espinosa agreed. "Find the snitch, find the murderer. Find the murderer, find the new head of the W.U.L.F."

"And you think that person is me," Harry said with a sigh.

Price shook his head. "We're paid to be suspicious, Mr. Potter. Don't take offense. If we had any actual evidence of your involvement, then we wouldn't be standing here in your study having this little chat. But I'll be honest with you. There's loads of circumstantial evidence piling up against you. The bloody name on the wall doesn't help."

Harry's voice was no longer restrained. "That's insane," he proclaimed darkly.

"Lotta things are insane, Mr. Potter," Price agreed. "Wanting to maintain power over nonmagical people by not sharing your world with them, that seems a little insane to some of us. Conjuring up shadowy villains like the W.U.L.F. to scare your own people into living by outdated laws of secrecy, that also seems pretty insane. Of course, all of this is just conjecture at this point, I admit. But if it ever
stops
being conjecture, well…"

"The W.U.L.F. is
not
a creation of the Department of Aurors," Harry said with cold emphasis. "Has it even begun to occur to you that it might have been one of
your
men who tipped them off about the impending raid? Frankly, if the Wizard's United Liberation Front believes what they claim, then your own people are much more sympathetic with them than is the Department of Aurors."

"Really, Mr. Potter," Price chided. "That's a little childish, isn't it? You perceive that we are accusing you, so you accuse us in response. I expected better from you."

"
Someone
alerted them that we were coming," Harry insisted. "On my side, the only people who knew about the raid were Titus Hardcastle and myself."

"And we have your word for that only," Price said, effecting an apologetic tone of voice. "Be reasonable, Mr. Potter. Do you mean to say that you didn't tell anyone else at the Ministry of Magic? Or even your wife and family?"

"I mean to tell you that those on my side who knew about today's raid," Harry growled, "are people who I trust completely. Members of our raiding party, including myself, might have gotten killed today had the W.U.L.F. chosen to ambush us instead of run. Why would my own people have risked that?"

"If your people and the W.U.L.F. are one and the same," Espinosa suggested, "then it wouldn't be a risk at all, would it?"

Harry drew a deep breath, composing himself. "Gentlemen, if this is where we stand, then I fail to see how we can continue to work together. Either arrest me for conspiracy or let me and my associates work alone."

"Now let's not get huffy, Harry," Price said, softening his tone and raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Espinosa and I are just doing our jobs. The task of the Magical Integration Bureau is to protect the interactions between the magical and the non-magical world and to see that the two coexist with as much harmony as possible. Your people have chosen to hide yourselves and live among us in secrecy, which has always struck the Bureau as suspicious on the very surface of it. You can't blame us for approaching our duties with a degree of healthy skepticism, can you? Look, if you're innocent, then you have nothing to fear from our involvement. If you're guilty, then of course we can't just allow you to operate without our supervision. Either way, Harry, you're stuck with us. Let's try to make that fact as pleasant as possible, eh?"

 There was a long pause as Harry appeared to consider this. In the window reflection, James could see Price standing to the side, his face stony, waiting. Across from him, Espinosa looked vaguely bored. He stared up at the dark ceiling, eyebrows raised inscrutably.

"So be it," Harry finally said. "But if I suspect that your notions of mistrust are undermining our investigations, or worse, placing us all in danger, then be assured that I will abandon this mission, regardless of the consequences. Is that understood?"

"Duly noted," Price said with a smile. "I'm glad that we can all dispense with any pretenses. Everything all out in the open. That's the way I like it. Right, Espinosa?"

"Right you are, Price," the other man agreed soberly.

"I assume you can find the door on your own," Harry replied. "Merry Christmas, gentlemen, and goodnight."

James heard shuffling footsteps and saw the door's reflection as it opened again. A few moments later, the elevator doors dinged from down the hall. Price and Espinosa, apparently, were on their way back down to the parking garage.

Without turning the chair around, James asked quietly, "You know I'm here, don't you?"

Harry, still leaning against the front of the desk, chuckled drily. "I never leave my chair facing the window. I figured it was either you or Albus. Frankly, I was betting on the latter."

"Nice counter-spell on the lockbox," James said, swiveling the chair to face his father. "I wasn't trying to nick the cloak and map, you know. I was just… checking on them."

Harry nodded, looking back at his son over his shoulder. With a sigh, he turned around and plopped onto one of the visitor's chairs.

"So, what do you think, James?" he asked. "Is this whole investigation a lost cause?"

"Why would they think you were involved with the same bad guys that you're trying to catch?" James exclaimed incredulously. "I mean, it doesn't make any sense!"

"It makes sense from their viewpoint," Harry said sadly. "You were at Neville's assembly, so you heard how a lot of people around here think. Many of them truly believe that the Ministry of Magic would indeed stoop to creating shadow villains, from Voldemort to the W.U.L.F., just to keep the magical world under their thumb. If that was true, then it would make perfect sense that I'd be in on it, and might even be one of the masterminds of the scheme."

"That's what Ralph said, too," James acknowledged reluctantly. "But none of it's true! How can they believe such a bunch of drivel?"

Harry frowned thoughtfully. "Once you abandon the concept of truth, James, everything becomes merely a matter of
perspective.
For the Progressive Element, there is no right or wrong; there are only sides. When one of those sides defeats another, they don't see it as a triumph of good over evil or evil over good. They view it merely as one side exerting unfair power over the other. Without truth—without any belief in right and wrong—the best one can hope for in life is a sort of lukewarm concept of fairness, where both sides in any fight simply choose to live and let live. They think that what we call 'good' should just learn to tolerate what we call 'evil' since good and evil are really just equally valid philosophies of life."

"But," James began, screwing up his face in an effort to understand. "But, that's obviously crazy. This isn't like disagreeing over whether flying carpets should be legal or not. Voldemort was a bloodthirsty villain who killed people just for the sake of his own power. Stopping him was the only way to save countless other lives, wasn't it?"

"Not according to the Progressive Element," Harry replied, shaking his head. "They think that if only we'd stopped fighting him, laid down our weapons, and given him his right to live the way he wanted to, then we'd all have just lived in peace, somehow."

James considered this for a moment, his eyes narrowed, and then shrugged. "But then he'd just have killed every last one of you."

Harry nodded. "Probably. Voldemort wasn't a 'live and let live' sort of wizard, especially considering the prophecy. One of us had to die for the other to survive. But really, prophecy or not, that's how it is in every corner of the world, in every struggle between evil and good, between power and love. The two cannot compromise because they cancel each other out. There will always be a struggle between them until one prevails over the other. There is no alternative."