All Debts Must be Paid

Chapter Fourteen: The Ministry - Jacks

When Jacks got to Kellow's office, Joan told him he had already gone up to see Fudge. There was a message saying he was to go up himself, so he grimly walked up the stairs. It wouldn't surprise him at all to find out that Davis had gone to Fudge first.

Miss Smithers, Fudge's secretary was sitting at her desk, looking briskly efficient as she always did. She looked him up and down as he walked in, a look that categorised him as some sort of insect. "Jacks?" she asked before he could say anything.

"I had a message to come up here," he responded.

"You're to go through." And she waved him into the inner sanctum.

As he walked in, Davis was standing laughing at something Fudge had said. The sight just about made him ill.

"By thunder, Davis," said Fudge, "it's lucky you were in charge of this operation, eh Kellow. I bet you're glad to have this chap on your team."

"As you say, Minister," responded Kellow with an ironic smile.

"Well I'm certainly recommending a promotion for this, you know." Fudge wagged a finger at Kellow, "And a medal. Goes without saying."

"I don't know what to say, Minister, I was only doing my job," Davis smarmed at Fudge.

Once again, Jacks was nearly physically sick. He was about to excuse himself when they finally deigned to notice him and Kellow beckoned him over.

"Ah, you must be Jack the assistant," said Fudge. "It must make you very proud to work with Davis here."

Jacks winced as Fudge got his name wrong and replied, "Very proud, sir."

"Mmm," Fudge continued, "might learn a thing or two from him. Not like last time when you let Black get away, eh?"

Jacks struggled to keep a neutral face. He wouldn't have thought Fudge would remember him from that incident. Davis must have told him. Bastard. Eventually he managed to get away, and left Fudge's office. He was angry at himself for caring so much he'd been set up. It really wasn't as if he wanted to be standing where Davis was now, talking to Fudge. All he'd wanted out of this was something that would cancel out that awful operation in Caithness. And hell yes! For people to know he had done it. But now with Davis pinching the credit for bringing Black in, that was hardly likely to happen. What made it worse was that he had seen it coming. Hell, even Black had seen it coming. He headed for the stairs.

"Where do you think you're going?" a voice asked.

Jacks turned round and saw Kellow, coming out of Fudge's office.

Why bother lying? "The pub," Jacks responded.

"No you're not, you've got work to do."

"What, before you transfer me back to Archives and Records for being a waste of space?"

"Right! My office, now!" Kellow snapped in a tone that dared Jacks to defy him.

Jacks shrugged and followed him.

They went into Kellow's office, and Jacks closed the door behind him. Kellow sat down at his desk; there was a chair in front of the desk, but Kellow didn't indicate that Jacks should sit. He sat down anyway.

Kellow narrowed his eyes. "Let me make this quite clear," he said, "I will not tolerate insubordination from you. If you want to go back to Archives and Records, then you're going the right way about it."

Jacks said nothing.

Kellow leaned back in his chair, steepling his hands in front of him. "However, since I believe that that is the last place you want to go as you would never have come up with this harebrained scheme to trap Black in the first place, there must be some other reason for this behaviour."

"It wasn't harebrained."

"Yes it was. The fact that in the end it seems to have worked is a bloody miracle. Are you suggesting that Mr Davis had rather less to do with its success than he has led us to believe?"

"Well, what do you think?" Jacks responded sarcastically. He wasn't being clever, he knew that, but he was angry.

"And you think you should be getting the medal, and the reception and the newspaper interviews?"

Jacks looked revolted. "Of course not, but that's not the point and you know it. I just want some acknowledgement that with my track record -"

"You're forgetting something, Jacks," said Kellow, "you don't have a track record any more. Oh you may have been good at one time, but that was years ago. All you've got now is a monumental cock up that could have cost the life of The Boy Who Lived, and two years spent staring at the bottom of a beer glass. Or are you onto the hard stuff now?"

Jacks winced but said nothing.

Kellow wasn't finished. "Davis on the other hand, has had a moderately successful career, and is regarded with some degree of approbation by those in authority. Whether you would wish to argue that he has had his success because he has been put in situations where he either could not do any damage or it did not matter if he did is neither here nor there. The fact remains that Davis is up there chatting to Fudge instead of you, is because he isn't as stupid as he looks and he has friends in the right places."

Kellow paused, looking Jacks up and down, clearly unimpressed with what he saw. He continued, "In addition, Fudge can also see that Davis is the person who rescued this operation from ignominy. Yes, it was your idea, but as a result of your idea we nearly had to explain to Fudge how Black broke Lupin out of the lock ups. As it was, we still have to explain how Black got into the building and back out again. Of course now we can ask him. In fact there's a lot of things we need to ask him before Fudge sets the Dementors on him, so we need to bloody get on with it."

Jacks felt himself grow more and more angry as Kellow as good as admitted he knew that Davis was a fraud but wasn't going to do anything about it. He wasn't sure what he had expected. Kellow had always struck him as someone who operated with a degree of integrity, in the same way he liked to think he had operated himself at one time, he thought ironically. To find he was subject to the power of influence as much as anyone else was an unpleasant shock. He wasn't sure how to respond. In the end all he said was, "Yes, sir."

Kellow sighed. "Welcome back to the real world, Jacks."

"You know, I don't think I want to live here, anymore," Jacks replied, and before Kellow could say any more, he stood up and stalked out of the room.

Almost before he was half way along the corridor he was regretting his hasty action. Talk about burning your bridges you stupid bastard. He would have turned back, but there had been several people waiting to see Kellow in the outer office and it was too late.

Furious with himself and with Kellow and Davis and the whole damn lot of them, he barely noticed where he was going until he stood outside the Leaky Cauldron. He thought for a moment, then shook his head, too bright and cheerful for how he was feeling. He walked through to Diagon Alley and then took the turning into Knockturn Alley, heading for Crippens.

Inside, Sharp Face had finished his shift, as Jacks didn't recognise the barman. In a place like this, he wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. Frankly, he didn't care any more.

"Bottle of Ogden's," he said.

The barman raised an eyebrow, but brought a bottle out from under the bar. "That'll be five galleons," he said.

"Bloody rip off," muttered Jacks, throwing the money down.

"Do you want it or not?" demanded the barman in an unfriendly voice. Then as Jacks stared at him, he continued, "Because if you don't or you make trouble you're out that door now."

"Course I want it," Jacks responded, picking it up. "Do I get a glass?"

Again the barman raised an eyebrow, this time as if to say, bloody amateur. But he gave him a glass. Jacks picked it up with the bottle and walked over to an empty booth and sat down.

He sat for over two hours, slowly drinking his way through the bottle of Fire whisky. The stuff was well named. It left a trickle of fire down his throat and into his belly, which lingered for minutes after every gulp. It wasn't the sort of stuff you could drink quickly.

However, faster than he would have thought possible, the level of the whisky in the bottle sank until, looking at it, he realised he had drunk nearly half of it. He didn't feel any better though. What was worse, he didn't seem to be drunk either. He had been hoping to drink his bitter resentment into oblivion but it was having no effect. Perhaps there was something wrong with it. The stuff didn't taste like cold tea, so he tapped the bottle with his wand and said, "Finite Incantatem." It didn't make any difference; he still didn't get drunk.

Then someone sat down and proceeded to stare right back at him. The man was one of those people you saw about, although he couldn't have put a name to the face. He was well-built in his late thirties, with a black moustache so thin he probably had to shave around it, Jacks thought contemptuously. Wanker.

"I think you'll find, that it doesn't make you feel any better," the man said after looking at him with a long, considering stare.

"What?" Jacks responded aggressively. "Who the hell are you and what do you want?"

"Name's Macnair, I'm an executioner for the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures."

Macnair? That sounded vaguely familiar. "And? That doesn't explain why you're here bothering me."

Macnair gave a thin smile. "You haven't heard?"

"Heard what? I've been kind of busy this evening." He indicated the bottle of Fire whisky.

The other man smiled, but he didn't look terribly amused. "You should get back to work. I understand your department needs all hands to the pumps so to speak. Although Fudge is rather desperately trying to keep it under wraps I don't think he'll succeed."

As Jacks looked at him blankly, the executioner explained, "Sirius Black has apparently, yet again disappeared from custody."

Jacks couldn't help it. He burst out laughing. So much for Davis and his bloody medal now!

"You find it amusing?" Macnair asked.

"Don't you?"

"Not really. Oh I heard all about Fudge's proposal to give your colleague Davis the Order of Merlin. It did surprise me as I have previous experience of Mr Davis' competence." The man continued, "However, I tend to look at the bigger picture, and I can see that it's really not so funny after all."

"And why the hell do you care so much?"

"Because as well as working for the Ministry, Mr Jacks, I represent certain er, Interests who believe that the re-capture of Black is far too important a matter to be left to the likes of incompetents such as Mr Davis." Macnair paused, and looked at Jacks with that appraising stare again. "We feel that if those working for the MLES cannot capture dangerous criminals such as Black, then we will find someone who can."

Jacks gave a mirthless smile. "Well, as I was recently rather forcefully reminded, I don't have much of a track record in the competence department, so why come to me?"

"Because you are hungry Mr Jacks and hungry people try so much harder."

"Hungry?"

Mcnair smiled thinly. "Yes, hungry for recognition, hungry to prove that you can still do, what you once did so well. Because you do indeed have a track record, Mr Jacks, particularly in the fight against those who practice Dark Magic."

Jacks snorted. "That was a long time ago."

Macnair ignored this but carried on, "Imagine the recognition you would get for bringing Sirius Black in, independently of the MLES. That would show those in authority that they had made a mistake in dismissing your talents in such a cavalier manner. For failing to recognise that a fool such as Davis couldn't possibly have been the one who brought in Black today.

Somewhere at the back of Jacks' mind a small alarm bell was ringing. There was a lot about this man Macnair that just didn't seem quite right. But then he dismissed it as a response to the fact that he seemed to have had a personality bypass.

"These 'Interests' you say you represent," he began, "who exactly are they?"

"A group of like minded people who have the well being of the Wizarding world close to their hearts, people who prefer to work in the background -"

"Oh that's bullshit and you know it," Jacks broke in. "Who are they really, a bunch of Gringotts goblins worried about their bank if You-Know-Who really has come back?"

Macnair gave another thin smile. "Something like that," he said.

Jacks wasn't convinced, but it would certainly make sense for a group of business interests to be concerned about the economic impact of Voldemort's return. Perhaps dissatisfaction with Fudge's administration was more widespread than he had supposed. Didn't mean they had to be nice people. He realised that that was what was bothering him about Macnair. Despite the personality bypass he seemed to be trying very hard to be nice. It wasn't working too well.

"You don't have to decide just now," Macnair said then, "although of course, the sooner you get after Black the easier it will be to catch him again."

Jacks thought, well that was certainly true.

Macnair continued, "But if you want, you can sleep on it, and give me your decision tomorrow. Naturally, we can give you whatever resources you require -"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," responded Jacks. "Where will I meet you?"

Macnair appeared to consider, although Jacks got the impression he wasn't thinking about it at all. "Why don't I just pay you a visit?"

"At work?"

"No at your flat - I didn't think you were intending going in tomorrow somehow."

"Oh. Probably not."

Macnair gave another of his thin smiles. "I'll see you tomorrow morning then," he responded and stood up.

"Just a minute, don't you want to know where I live?"

"Oh, we already know where you live, Mr Jacks." On which Parthian shot, Macnair left.

It was odd, thought Jacks after the executioner had gone. If Macnair had wanted him to go after anyone other than Sirius Black, he would have thought that he was being recruited by Death Eaters.