Read Chapter 24: The Silent Pursuit

The mail room stank of ink, oil, and canvas—a hundred canvas sacks sagging on steel racks, their guts stuffed with letters that would never reach Liverpool. Jack flattened himself against the bulkhead, pressed his back to cold riveted iron, and listened.

Water lapped somewhere below. The ship groaned, a sound like a wounded animal trying to stand.

Margaret crouched beside him, her skirts darkened to the knee, her face lit by the single swinging electric bulb that flickered with each settling of the hull. She was studying the far door, where a crack of light bled from beneath the mail sorting office.

"He's in there," she whispered.

"Aye. And he's not alone, unless he's recruited the postal clerks to his side." Jack wiped sweat from his brow. The air down here was thick as soup, heavy with coal dust and the faint chemical bite of something wrong—the smell that had been following them since the engine room. Phosphorus. He'd smelled it once before, in a chemist's shop in Dublin that had burned to the ground.

"You think he brought men?"

"I think Vance does nothing alone when he can do it with meat shields." Jack pulled the brass key from his pocket, ran his thumb over the teeth. Useless here. Everything was useless except speed and nerve. "Stay behind me."

"You keep saying that."

"And you keep ignoring me. So move."

They crossed the mail room in a low crouch, weaving between the sorting tables and the towering racks of mail bags. The mail clerks had abandoned their posts—he could tell by the half-sorted letters scattered across the floor, the overturned stools. The crew had been called to the boats, or the water had already chased them out.

Through the gap in the door, Jack saw him.

Vance stood at a waist-high iron stove, its door hanging open, flames licking at the edges of a sheaf of papers in his gloved hand. The orange glow painted his face in hard angles, hollowing out his cheeks, making his eyes look like two black coins. The ledger case lay open on the sorting table beside him, its contents scattered—pages of names, numbers, signatures. The identities of every client whose fortune had passed through his banker's hands.

He was feeding them to the fire, one sheet at a time.

Jack pushed the door open. "You'll want to keep those. They're the only thing standing between you and a noose."

Vance didn't flinch. He turned his head slowly, the paper in his fingers curling at the edges, blackening. Embers drifted up toward the ceiling.

"O'Leary." He said it like a curse, like a man tasting something spoiled. "You're persistent. I'll give you that. Most men know when they're beaten."

"Most men don't have a fire at their back and a ship full of ice water at their feet." Jack stepped into the room, Margaret close behind. "The bulkhead charge—Bell's set it for midnight. You know what's in that hold with it, don't you? The phosphorus crate from your own manifest."

Vance's expression flickered. Just for an instant. Then it smoothed again, a mask of cold marble. "You're clever. I've always said that about you. Clever enough to be dangerous, not clever enough to be smart."

"Is it true?" Margaret's voice cut through the heat. "About Anna?"

Vance glanced at her, dismissive. "Who?"

"The woman you sent to Boston." Margaret's hands were fists at her sides. "The one who knew too much about your gambling debts. The one who was supposed to meet my sister at the bank and never arrived."

Something shifted in Vance's face. Recognition, perhaps. Or the calculation of a man deciding which lie would serve him best. "Ah. The Jackson girl." He tossed the burning paper into the stove with practiced nonchalance. "She was a courier. Nothing more. She carried the list to Boston, and she made the mistake of thinking her employer would protect her. But my employer—the man whose name is at the top of that registry—he doesn't leave loose threads."

"He killed her."

"He had her killed." Vance corrected her with the tone of a schoolmaster. "There's a difference, Miss. One of them has paperwork."

Jack stepped forward, putting himself between Vance and Margaret. The heat from the stove pressed against his back, uncomfortable, insistent. "Who is it? The banker. Give me a name, and maybe you walk away from this before the hull cracks in two."

Vance laughed—a dry, humorless sound. "You think I'm the villain here, O'Leary? You think I'm the one who set this ship on a collision course with an iceberg?" He picked up another sheet from the pile, held it to the flames. "You've been chasing me for days, and you still don't understand what you're holding. This isn't a list of stolen goods. It's a list of names—men and women who deposited their fortunes with my employer before they disappeared. Before they were disappeared. Every one of them, gone without a trace, and the money still sitting in vaults, collecting interest, waiting for no one to claim it."

"You're confessing to murder." Jack kept his voice flat.

"I'm explaining arithmetic. There's a difference." Vance fed another page to the fire. "My employer is a man of considerable repute in London. A man whose name appears in the same breath as charities and cathedrals. If that list reaches the wrong hands—if anyone learns the true scale of what he's done—he stands to lose everything. And I mean everything, O'Leary. His fortune, his standing, his freedom. Men like that don't accept ruin quietly."

"So he sent you to sink the ship."

"He sent me to ensure the list never left this vessel. The ship sinking is an inconvenience. The list surviving—" Vance shook his head. "That's an impossibility I'm not prepared to allow."

Water rushed somewhere nearby, gurgling through a passageway. The floor tilted, just a few degrees, and the stove creaked on its frame. Jack steadied himself against the sorting table.

"You'll burn yourself out of a lifeboat," he said. "The boats are nearly all away by now. You want to survive this, you need to be moving up, not down."

"Then we have something in common." Vance reached into the ledger case and pulled out a revolver, gleaming dully in the firelight. He must have had it tucked beneath the papers. "We both need to move up. And I intend to do so without your interference."

Margaret moved—fast, faster than Jack expected, lunging for the stove. She grabbed a handful of unsorted letters from the table and swept them into her arms, papers scattering as Vance swung the gun toward her.

Jack hit him low, a tackling drive into his midsection that carried them both against the stove. The metal rang like a bell, and the impact sent the ledger case clattering to the floor, its remaining pages spilling across the overflow. Vance grunted, the revolver cracking against Jack's shoulder blade, and Jack felt the blow jar through his ribs.

They grappled on the wet floor, kicking up papers, both of them slipping on the slick surface. Vance's finger found the trigger, and the gun roared—a wild shot that punched through a mail sack and sent feathers of shredded paper into the air.

Margaret grabbed the ledger case, clutching it to her chest like a child.

Jack drove his fist into Vance's jaw. Another shot, this one burning past Jack's ear. Then Vance kneed him in the groin, and the world went white.

When Jack blinked the pain away, Vance was on his feet, backing toward the far door, the revolver still trained on them. Blood trickled from his split lip. He'd lost the ledger case, but he still had the gun, and he still had the list—a crumpled handful of half-burned pages stuffed into his coat pocket.

"You've cost me time," he said. "But not my life. You'll be seeing me again, O'Leary. On the boat deck, or at the bottom of the sea."

He dropped through the far door and let it slam shut behind him.

Water sloshed over Jack's boots. The corridor beyond the mail room was already flooding—chest-deep, black and cold. He scrambled to his feet, offered a hand to Margaret.

"The case—"

"I have it." She clutched the ledger tight. "But he still has the registry pages. He's got enough to destroy the names."

"He's got a gun, and he's heading up." Jack grabbed her arm. "We're going to have to get ahead of him. There's only one way he can go, through the boiler rooms to the main stairwell."

"That's where the charge is. The phosphorus."

"Then we have until midnight to stop him from reaching the boats." Jack pulled her toward the door, into the rising water. "And that's assuming the boiler rooms don't blow before we get there."

The water swallowed their footsteps, and somewhere above, the ship's band played on.