The United Nations building always smelled like polished stone and hours of boredom. John Major felt it in his throat the moment he stepped out of the lift and into the corridor reserved for heads of government. Too much heat, too many bodies, too many people trying to look calm for cameras that were questioning the reason for an emergency summit.
Major slid his earpiece into place and looked down at the agenda sheet.
A clerk guided him toward the chamber with the same careful smile people wore at funerals.
The last time he had been invited to New York for a meeting like this, it had not been in this chamber.
-
It had been upstairs, in a conference room with a view that should have been impressive. A long table, cut glass water pitchers, prime ministers and presidents pretending they had brought their own decisions with them.
The American detail had swept the room twice. They had checked vents, under tables, and the ceiling tiles. Major had watched them work and thought.
The door had opened, and a tall man entered. Akingbade walked in as he belonged there.
Not in a theatrical way. A dark robe, boots made of some strange hide and a ring that caught the light. His eyes swept the table and stopped on faces as if he were counting assets.
Major had held his gaze and kept his voice level.
Akingbade explained the problems with the Wizards of the Ministers in front of him. He explained how they are a danger to the nations and Muggle society. As ICW, it was their duty to warn them and some other poetic nonsense. Neither Major nor the other Ministers were born yesterday. They had already smelled the internal conflict between the veiled inhabitants of the planet.
"This is a matter for your own community," Major stated. "If you have internal disputes, you solve them internally. You do not bring state structures into it. You do not bring us into it."
Akingbade let the silence stretch, just enough for translators to catch up. He reached into his mokeskin pouch and drew out a folder; on his other hand, his wand appeared.
Akingbade flicked it once.
Parchments from the folder flew to every one of the Ministers.
Not one page per Minister. A folder for every leader present, placed precisely, aligned with the edge of the table as if an unseen assistant had measured it.
The movement of that stick was small. The effect was not.
Major opened his. He did it slowly. He flipped the cover and found his own government staring back at him.
Names. Addresses. Unit designations.
A list of offices that did not exist on any public chart.
A set of memos with his own signature on the second page of one of them, dated months earlier, a briefing he barely remembered.
On the next sheet: a photograph of a shabby building in Birmingham with a brass plaque he had never seen. Inside, the caption read, Magical recruitment office.
The term made his teeth itch.
He turned another page.
Reports on children.
Reports on families.
Reports on containment.
One page carried a summary of an experiment. Blood samples. Spinal taps. A note about "extraction attempts" written in language too clinical to hide what it meant.
Around the table, papers rustled. Someone swore in Polish. Someone else in German, softer, as if the walls might charge them for it.
Akingbade rested the wand against his palm and watched them read.
"The pact," he stated, "was agreed in sixteen ninety two. We call it a statute, it is a restraint."
Major lifted his head. "If this is true, it is not my government. Not knowingly."
Akingbade's smile held no warmth. "It is your world. Your agencies. Your thrones, as your ancestors would have called them. You can split responsibility into committees if it helps you sleep more easily. The result remains."
The cold in the room did not leave.
Major's fingers tightened on the paper. He forced them to loosen. A man did not win an argument with someone who could make documents appear out of thin air.
Across from him, one of the continental leaders leaned forward.
"What do you want?"
Akingbade's eyes slid toward the speaker, then back across the table, like a ruler checking a line.
"You have been monitoring us," he replied. "You have been cultivating our people. You have been stealing them."
He did not raise his voice. That made it worse.
"You will stop. You will demonstrate that you can still honour the pact. You will raid the locations I provide. You will do it gently, if you like that word. ICW is simply warning you, Witches and Wizards of your countries have deflected. They are poised for an attack, and we are giving you an early warning. It is for the greater good that you act first and secure those places."
Major had wanted to refuse.
He had opened his mouth.
Then, for one breath, his mind had slid sideways. It was like remembering the importance of acting first, before the crisis gets out of hand. There was nothing to refute. ICW was doing what it was meant to do. What it has agreed to do all those centuries ago.
When he closed his folder, he found his hand moving without asking permission.
He had heard his own voice agree to terms he would have mocked some moments ago.
He had watched others do the same.
When the meeting ended, they had filed out with straight backs and dead eyes, each holding a set of names and locations.
Diagon Alley.
Hogwarts.
Back in London, Dame Stella Rimington and Sir Colin McColl had explained what they could based on reports of known spells of the Magicals.
"There is a procedure," Rimington had stated, tapping a finger against the folder. "A spell, if you want the accurate term. It convinces people or smooths resistance. If you have ever wondered why some of our assets complied when they should not have, it is because someone wanted them to comply."
McColl had added, "Based on this folder, we have two structures operating inside our own house, Prime Minister. Both are tasked with monitoring their world. Neither has been reporting to me or MI5. Neither has been registered or recorded as well."
Major had stared at them and felt something sour settle behind his ribs.
He had not been surprised that such magic existed.
He had been surprised that his own country had been running two secret services without informing the man supposedly in charge.
The raid plans had been written to look civilised. Gentle and disciplined, as if that mattered.
Explosives first to disturb the wards, without them, they would now be able to even notice the structures in front of them.
Then entry. Then containment.
Major had signed off because the signature was necessary for the greater good of his people. He paused for a moment. That phrase tasted foreign to his mind. He shook his head. The room had been full of people who had already planned the operations. Every detail was thought of. He sighed and gave the green light.
-
Now, in the United Nations chamber, he watched minister after minister describe the outcome.
A delegate from southern Europe spoke with shaking hands, describing his interior minister collapsing in his office. No visible wounds. No poison. Only a sudden hollowness in the eyes.
A Scandinavian representative followed, voice hard with fear, recounting the same pattern across an entire committee.
They all talked about the cold. An unnatural cold. Breath frosting in rooms where radiators were burning.
Men and women were left alive, but vacant.
The French representative said the word they were not familiar with.
Dementors.
A Magical entity. Wraithlike, hostile to living beings, and an invisible assailant.
Then a British analyst with too little sleep admitted the obvious.
"The symptoms of the victims fit the profile of the creatures the magical side calls Dementors," the man stated, eyes fixed on his notes as if looking up would make it real. "We cannot see them. We cannot stop them with conventional means. We only observe the temperature drop and the outcome."
Major took a slow breath. The chamber smelled like warm wool and stale coffee. He was able to taste the fear in the chamber.
The next question came like a hammer.
Where were their networks responsible for monitoring the 'other side'?
The people who had supposedly been watching the magical world for decades were all gone. Not one answered a phone. Not one appeared in a safe house. Not one sent a signal.
They were not among the soulless victims.
They were absent.
Someone from the German delegation spoke the thought aloud.
"We assume they are kidnapped," the man stated. "They were removed from the board." He sighed. "It seems we were not as smart as we thought we were, and they were not as archaic as we thought them to be."
The French minister, pale and furious, leaned toward his microphone. "Then we have no channel. No envoy. No contact. Only the ridiculous birds sitting in those empty offices."
It would have sounded comical in a different year.
It did not sound comical now.
Major watched the room reach the only conclusion that did not end with everyone dead.
De escalate.
Open a diplomatic channel.
Send something that could not be intercepted by invisible creatures.
Someone joked, voice thin, about sending a letter by owl in this day and age. Nobody laughed.
The chair called for final remarks. Papers shifted. Translators adjusted their headsets. A few leaders looked relieved, as if naming a plan made it safe.
Then Gro Harlem Brundtland rose from Norway's seat.
She did not ask permission.
The microphone caught the scrape of her chair on the floor.
Her face was set, not angry, nor apologetic. It was the expression of someone who had made a decision.
"Norway will withdraw from the United Nations," she stated.
For a moment, Major did not process the words. His mind reached for reasons. Legalities. Treaties. Procedure.
Brundtland did not offer reasons. The rest of the Scandinavian states followed.
Sweden.
Finland.
Poland.
Denmark.
Estonia.
Latvia.
Lithuania.
One after another, voices declaring the same sentence in different accents, each one cutting away another piece of the world Major had assumed was fixed.
Major turned his head and watched the chamber ripple. The clerks froze with pens poised. The interpreters blinked as if they had misheard. A man from the American side leaned toward his aide and mouthed something sharp.
The word alliance hovered over the room without anyone saying it.
Major felt his stomach drop.
This was not a slap.
It was a punch, and the room was only now feeling the break.