His vision darted to a few others before passing through another wall to settle on Rufus Scrimgeour. If he was pressed to name one, Alastor would still say Scrimgeour had been his best student; as well he should be since Rufus was the person he'd hand-picked to run the office when Harold Minchum, the Minister before last, had tried to foist the job on him. Maybe he should have taken it; taking Scrimgeour out of the field had stuck one of their best men behind a desk just when they had needed ten more like him out there every day.
He had taught Rufus to throw away the rule book if you had to when it came to getting results, because your enemy didn't have rules, but putting him in charge of others had made the man cling to the book worse than a Seventh Year on their way to N.E.W.T.s. It had ruined a good fighter and turned the office into something mechanistic, and instead of minting more fighters just like him they had gotten softer and softer by all the coddling. Rufus would be a good fighter to have in his corner if the time ever came to take on Voldemort himself, just like Kingsley, but right now his book would tell him to take this straight to the Minister.
Alastor's magical eye spun again, peering through all the space between him and Level 1, where he saw Cornelius Fudge sitting in a meeting with Lucius Malfoy and Dolores Umbridge behind a hazy screen against eavesdroppers. Malfoy was a Death Eater for sure, and Umbridge a likely sympathizer; taking anything to Fudge would see him share it with them so they could tell him what to do. Scrimgeour being out means he might have to do this without an official sanction, at least for now.
Retracting his vision back in, Alastor sought out the last face that might be of use, finally finding her on Level 2 between the Improper Use of Magic Office and the Wizengamot Administration Services. Withdrawing his eye from seeing more of Amelia Bones than Alastor had ever wanted to see, he tried to concentrate on any reason not to bring her into this. As head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, with titular control of the Auror Office, she seemed the logical choice to make if he wanted to do this with the pretense of legality.
She was a dyed in the wool litigator, though she gave the impression she'd approve an off-the-books investigation of this kind if she had to. At first glance having most of her family wiped out by Voldemort the seemed to work in her favor, undoubtedly she wouldn't want to see the man make a return. Having her brother become involved in the Order of the Phoenix only to die and leave behind a daughter for her to raise could be problematic, though it redoubled his determination for no kids or young people to be involved.
Her taking an interest in the Auror Office after leaving things in Scrimgeour's hands for so long would surely raise concerns, perhaps even getting the Minister involved, and then they'd be right where Alastor didn't want things to go. If he couldn't officially go off the books, and couldn't unofficially do the same, then there was nothing left to do but to toss everything aside and go off on his own, and would leave him with few resources and very little to go on. There had to be another option.
Alastor had fought against and taken down dark wizards for longer than he cared to remember, and you couldn't do that without developing some sense of the enormity of the problem you faced. With his two prime sources of information, Dumbledore and the boy, about to be locked in a very public battle with an intense amount of scrutiny on everyone around them, and any potential allies within the Ministry out of reach for the moment, his sense was telling him he was dealing with the most laborious, most exhaustive, and most time-consuming endeavor he's ever come across.
He shoved the images from his eye away and scrubbed a gnarled hand across his ruined face. This was going to take forever and he would get nowhere quickly, especially not sitting where he was - but perhaps that could be an opportunity. Albus, Kingsley, Scrimgeour, and the others were sure to see any digging for information about the past as evidence of something going on under the surface, so perhaps sitting still and going quietly was just the thing he needed to keep them from suspecting he was up to something.
That kind of slow pace and low information would leave him mired in theorycrafting for the foreseeable future and it was exactly the kind of thing he always hated; Alastor preferred to face his enemy head on. He was well known to hate it though, so privately pursuing it while publicly doing nothing to signify a problem would disguise more than demiguise ever could. The only problem was he was horrible at doing the theory himself; he'd forgotten more about the Dark Arts than most people ever learned. What he needed was someone as methodical, single-minded, and secretive as he was who could swim through any theory they got their hands on without ever drawing notice to themselves, and the likelihood of finding someone like that was-
Moody cursed himself for a fool before crawling over to draw the memory out of the pensieve and put it back in its vial. If it weren't for Lichfield and his fondness for nicknames he might've forgotten Froggy was still alive. Then again, Alastor preferred to forget that entire floor existed. Eye or no eye, no kind of magic should work like that.
Once the memory was safe in the vial, the vial was snug in his mokeskin pouch, and the mokeskin pouch secure in a hidden pocket, Alastor opened himself up to his eye again to scrutinize every inch of his office for any evidence it had been disturbed. Finding none, he pulled out a ring of seven keys and chose the second from the end. Reaching up, he managed to fit the key into a tiny hole near the ceiling and gave it a twist. With a hop, he pushed the roof of the compartment up, withdrew the key, and jumped again to grab the exposed edge.
With many a grunt and muttered curses, Alastor Moody emerged from the invisible cavernous hole next to a coat rack on the far side of his office. Rubbing his rib where the edge had dug in and flexing his amputated leg as he shut the lid, he knew he'd have to lessen the depth of that part of his trunk; he wasn't a kid anymore. He'd think about passing this off and retiring anyway but if Lonely Lester and Froggy Saul could work themselves to death then he wasn't about to stop short, and he wasn't even one of the Lost.
Fumbling for the right key, he used his magical eye so he could find and reopen his Disillusioned trunk and expose another compartment within, drawing out a silvery invisibility cloak. Alastor paused for a moment, rethinking the wisdom of his next act. As much as he hated the politics that came with big cases he hated interpersonal drama even more; it needlessly complicated everything.
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