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Dante ignores the remark. “Instead, you chose to do this. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the effort. The fake conductor was an especially nice touch. What’s his name again?”

“Seamus.”

“That’s right. Seamus.” Dante’s playing softens until only the lightest of notes rise from the piano. It sounds intimate. Like a whisper. Talking over it, he adds, “Are the two of you lovers?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Dante shrugs, and Anna takes it to mean he assumes the answer to be yes.

“As for the train’s legitimate workers, I imagine you paid them off.”

“I did,” Anna says.

“My father won’t be happy about that.”

“I think he’ll soon have more important matters to worry about.”

The music stops as Dante leans against the piano edge and rests his chin atop a closed fist. “Do you really think my father was behind all of that?”

“I know he was,” Anna says. “Honestly, you should, too. I have it on good authority that you work for him now.”

“So it says on my business card,” Dante replies. “But you can hardly describe what I do as work. My father barely speaks to me, and when he does, it’s to shoot down one of my suggestions. Honestly, I spend most of my day sitting at my desk and shuffling paper from one side to the other.”

“Come now. I’m sure you carve out plenty of time to flirt with the secretaries.”

“Only the ones that remind me of you,” Dante says, giving Anna a look of such acute longing that her breath catches in her throat.

“Regardless of what you do or don’t do for your father,” she manages to say, “it’s obvious he was up to no good back then. How do you think he got his hands on my father’s company? Or this very train?”

“I assumed he was doing your family a favor.”

Anna doesn’t know whether to laugh or be insulted. “A favor? My family lost everything in the process. And lest you forget, our fathers hated each other.”

“They did,” Dante says. “But I always thought that, like all good rivalries, there was some mutual respect involved.”

The comment finally makes up Anna’s mind. Insulted it is. Not to mention enraged.

“If your father had one ounce of respect for mine, he wouldn’t have organized an entire conspiracy to destroy him. Sal, Lapsford, the others, they did the dirty work, but your father was behind it all. You’re forgetting I have proof.”

“About this evidence. What, exactly, is it?”

“Memos, correspondence, more blueprints, even photographs.”

Dante leans forward, the look on his face turning from blithe to troubled. “And you think it’s enough to prove my father organized it?”

“Without a doubt,” Anna says. “The most damning evidence is the financial records. In 1942, your father transferred massive amounts of money to five numbered bank accounts in Switzerland. Care to guess who those accounts belonged to?”

“I think I already know,” Dante says.

“It’s foolproof,” Anna tells him. “I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if it wasn’t. Your father’s going to pay for what he did. All of them will. Their lives are ostensibly over the moment we reach Chicago.”

“That’s another thing I wondered about,” Dante says.

“Why Chicago? I mean, I understand the symbolism behind taking the Phoenix. That’s unmissable.

But a train to Washington or New York would have been faster—not to mention easier.

I knew there had to be another reason. And I’ve finally figured it out. Would you like me to tell you?”

Anna stands and stretches. “By all means, explain my motivations to me.”

“You want to watch us squirm,” Dante says.

“And is it working?”

“Do you see me squirming?”

“No,” Anna says as she starts toward the door, on her way into the dining car. “Fortunately, the night is still young. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see what the others are up to.”

Dante rises from the piano to follow her. “Probably beating down the door to the locomotive at this point.”

“It won’t work.”

Anna walks briskly through the dining car and galley, forcing Dante to scramble to keep pace. In the sleeper car, he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How did you make it so there’d be no other passengers?”

“I have my ways. After all, the train needed to be empty. I didn’t want to offer anyone a single means of escape.” Anna gestures to the doors at each end of the car. “On a crowded train, with people bustling to get on and off, it would be easy for someone to slip away in the crowd.”

“And it avoids having innocent bystanders onboard when things get ugly,” Dante adds. “Now that they know they’re trapped on this train, it’s only a matter of time before these people start to turn on each other.”

Anna doesn’t think so, despite already assuming things will get heated once desperation sets in.

She predicts accusations, confessions, blame being lobbed from one person to the next.

And while she knows there’s a chance they’ll go after her and Seamus—hence her knife and his own form of protection—she doesn’t think any of them will resort to targeting each other.

Still, as she and Dante enter the baggage car, Anna immediately clocks their manic mood.

Judd Dodge stands at the door to the locomotive, slamming his fist against it to no avail.

That doesn’t keep Jack Lapsford from also trying.

Trading places with Judd, he tries the door himself, first pulling the handle, then pushing it, then pulling again.

When neither motion causes it to budge, he resorts to pounding on the door and yelling, “Hello? Whoever’s in there, open up at once! ”

Sal joins in, punctuating her words with sharp raps against the door. “This! Is! An! Emergency!”

Anna pictures Burt Chapman at the front of the locomotive, oblivious to the racket. Even if he can hear them, she knows he’ll ignore it.

“I told him one of you would probably say that,” Anna says, announcing her presence in the baggage car.

Judd gives her a desperate look. “Then why isn’t he answering?”

“Because I knew we’d end up here eventually,” Anna says. “So I told him not to open the door. After paying him handsomely, of course.”

“Whatever she’s paying you,” Sal says with another bang on the door, “we’ll offer double!”

Anna puts a hand on her hip, impatient. “I told him you’d say that, too.”

“A million dollars!” Lapsford shouts, an amount that makes Herb Pulaski gasp. The others, too, give him looks of stupefied shock. The only person not surprised is Anna.

“He knew that was coming, too,” she says. “There’s literally nothing you can say or do that will get him to stop this train.”

“But you can stop it, right?” Judd asks.

“On the contrary, not even I can do that. Because I assumed one of you would try to imitate me—or, God forbid, coerce me through violence—I instructed the engineer to not obey a word anyone said. Even me.”

“You’re nuts,” Sal says. “Truly insane.”

Lapsford affirms that sentiment with a nod. “Why would he agree to that?”

“Because everyone who normally works on this train, from the dishwasher to the chief engineer, knows the purpose of this journey,” Anna says.

“And they were all too happy to step aside or, in the engineer’s case, provide assistance.

Workers also died because of your scheme.

The engineers. A conductor. Two porters.

On the railroad, devotion runs deep. They want justice as much as Seamus and I do. ”

Lapsford either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care. Pounding his fists against the door, he yells, “I am a high-ranking member of the United States Army, and I command you to stop this train.”

“ Retired high-ranking member,” Dante says, coming to Anna’s side. “Which doesn’t give you any authority at all. In fact, since this train belongs to my father—and since it will someday be mine—I think I’m the one who has the ultimate say over where it goes and when it stops, don’t you?”

“Then stop it and let all of us off,” Lapsford demands.

Anna goes rigid as Dante approaches the door.

Before boarding, back when she still expected Kenneth Wentworth, she told Burt Chapman his boss would be on the train—and that he’d likely do anything to stop it.

Burt assured her she had nothing to worry about, especially once she told him what Wentworth had done.

It didn’t hurt that she’d paid him twice as much as the rest of the train’s crew.

But Dante isn’t his father. Charm and persuasion are his specialties. If anyone can sweet-talk his way into stopping the Phoenix, it’s him.

He knocks on the door and clears his throat.

“My name is Dante Wentworth. My father owns this railroad, including the train you’re controlling.

As you’ve heard, there are some people out here desperate for you to stop it so they can disembark.

Considering these circumstances, I think it’s best that—”

Dante turns to give Anna a look she finds unreadable. For a second, she can’t breathe, certain he’s about to single-handedly stop the train and ruin her plan. All that work gone. All that plotting for nothing. All that expense wasted.

But then that crooked grin spreads across his face, and Anna exhales.

“I think it’s best that you keep this train moving,” Dante continues. “Ignore what anyone out here says, just as Miss Matheson instructed. Do not stop for any reason until we reach Chicago.”

He raps twice on the door and waits. A moment later, two more raps rise from the other side. Burt has received his message.

The train will not be stopping.