No one dared asked a senator traveling without his wife whom he was meeting at midnight. Even the ferry captain, a veteran North River waterman, was not brave enough to explain that a Van Dorn detective dressed like a deckhand had barged into his wheelhouse and drawn from his wallet a railroad pass unlike any he had ever seen. The document required all employees to accord him privileges of the line that exceeded even that of a senator who voted religiously in favor of legislation the railroads approved. Handwritten and signed and sealed by the president of the line, and witnessed by a federal judge, it superseded all dispatchers. Its only limits were common sense and the rules of safety.

“What did you do to get that pass?” the captain had asked as he hurriedly signaled the engine room Stop Engines.

“The president returned a favor,” had said the detective. “And I always tell the president how kindly I am treated by his employees.”

So the captain told the legislator, “A mechanical breakdown, Senator.”

“How the devil long are we going to wait here?”

“Everyone is disembarking for the next boat, sir. Let me carry your bag.” The captain seized the senator’s valise and led him to the main deck and down the gangway, where cold-faced detectives observed every passenger trooping off.

Isaac Bell stood behind the other Van Dorns, watching over their heads each and every face. The manner that Yamamoto had chosen to get away—jumping aboard at the last instant—made it clear that the shadows had slipped up, and the Japanese spy knew he was being followed. Now it was a chase.

Three hundred eighty passengers, men, women, and sleepy children, shuffled past. Thank the Lord, thought Bell, it was the middle of the night. The boats carried thousands at rush hour.

“That’s the last of them.”

“O.K. Now we check every nook and cranny on the boat. He’s hiding somewhere.”

A SMALL, elderly woman in a long black dress, a warm shawl, and a straw bonnet tied to her head with a dark scarf boarded a streetcar outside the Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal. It was a slow, stop-and-start ride to the city of Hoboken. The trolley looped around the square at Ferry and River streets, and now her journey moved swiftly as she descended to the first completed of the McAdoo tubes. For a nickel, she boarded an eight-car electric train so new it smelled of paint.