Albus smiled brilliantly. "Oh, feel free to look. If there was anything to find, we would have found it long ago. Remember that I was born in 1881. If books didn't exist back then, the chances of existing a hundred and forty years later are even more remote."
He looked at the other man placidly. "Mr. Nott, Tom was not the first man who wanted power. When I said we wanted to take over the world, I meant that very literally. I stopped, Gellert didn't. Either way, we would have found what needed to be found, and if we had, it would have disappeared long before now." He couldn't be sure that everything had been destroyed, but he'd done a very good job at burning books. The very little that remain was a maze of confusion and untruths.
"You can truthfully tell him that the Ministry has nothing on the subject," he said. "The rumours are just that, rumours about objects that when put together can grant you immortality. What those objects are and where they might be, if they were real in the first place, have been lost."