Now, standing in front of the rail terminal, he looked out and marveled at his good fortune. Slaton could not imagine that a better selection of transportation alternatives existed in any square mile of Europe. He saw a ferry port that dealt the full spectrum—passengers, cars, and long-haul trucks. A rail terminal lay directly behind him, and on the horizon was a shipping yard. In the harbor a small cruise ship had docked next to the fishing fleet, and an assortment of leisure craft lay moored in private slips. There were small bulk carriers and cargo ships, and around these, loading cranes and forklifts sat ready to connect everything to trucks that would spread their payloads across Germany and beyond. Yet if the possibilities seemed overwhelming, they narrowed considerably when he measured his means against his objective. He had thirty-nine U.S. dollars in his pocket. On that he had to reach Switzerland.

Patiently, Slaton reckoned how best to attack the problem. He walked toward the ferry terminal with a cool wind at his back, the air scented with evergreen and the acrid residual of wood-burning fireplaces getting an early-season workout. As the long northern dusk lost its grip, the walkways fell increasingly sectioned, deep shadows broken by shards of electric light. Slaton lingered in the darker recesses to study his options. His attention settled on a large ferry where vehicles were unloading, and after twenty minutes the answer to his problem lumbered down the big metal off-ramp.

He kept to the shadows and watched, and soon two more vehicles of the same type rolled off in direct succession. He followed the little convoy’s progress and saw them park, one by one, in a well-lit holding yard. He watched the drivers dismount and deliver the keys to a kind of dispatch shack. Slaton could not see inside the shack, but he imagined rows of keys hanging on hooks, or perhaps tagged and put in drawers. Either would serve the German penchant for organization. He kept watching, and in thirty minutes saw nine more of the type, nearly identical to the first, driven off the ferry, parked, and the keys delivered to the shack.

Satisfied he understood the process before him, Slaton began a well-practiced reverse flow. He searched for faults in the system, and saw a number of possibilities. He then studied the parking lot itself. The apron was massive, nearly a half mile in both length and width, and surrounded by a wire fence. The lot was roughly half full, a hodgepodge of trucks and cars and trailers and containers. Some would be gone in minutes, while others might expect spring flowers to blossom beneath their undercarriages. Of particular interest, Slaton noted that there was only one entrance, governed by the shack, where a heavy-set woman gave cursory inspections to everything that came and went.