The men in the room were all frowning as they studied the two images. Then one of them, a grey-haired man in his fifties wearing a suit with a red and yellow MCC tie, put his hand up to his face. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t we spot it before?’

‘Will somebody put me out of my misery?’ said Button. ‘What am I not seeing?’

Shepherd walked over to the screens and pointed at the rear of the ship coming into dock. He ran his finger along the first line of containers on the top level. He pointed at them one by one. ‘Green, red, white, white, blue, green, red, white, red, green,’ he said. ‘Ten.’

He walked over to the second screen, to the satellite picture of the Athena at sea. He pointed at the containers in the front row, one at time. ‘Green, red, white, white, blue, green, red, white, red,’ he said. ‘Nine.’

‘There’s an extra container,’ said Button. ‘When the ship docked at Southampton, there was an extra container on board.’

‘This green one, here,’ said Shepherd, going back to the first screen and pointing at a container on the starboard side. ‘I heard a helicopter one night after the pirates boarded. Twin rotors. Probably a Chinook.’

‘The helicopter took a container to the ship? From Yemen?’ Button frowned. ‘Is that possible?’

Shepherd tapped the green container on the screen. ‘This wasn’t here before we were boarded,’ he said.

‘The Athena stopped at Jeddah, remember? On the way to the Mediterranean.’

‘Only to drop cargo off,’ said Shepherd. ‘They weren’t due to take on cargo there. I saw the manifest on the bridge. They unloaded thirty-two containers at Jeddah. They weren’t due to take on any. And Jeddah was the only port it stopped at between being released and arriving at Southampton. That container could only have been put on board while we were at sea.’

‘That would explain why they took the ship closer to land,’ said the man in the MCC tie.

‘So what are we thinking here?’ said a young man with pointed sideburns and rectangular designer glasses. ‘Drugs? Weapons?’

Button shook her head. ‘No one’s going to go to all that trouble over contraband,’ she said.

‘A container full of heroin would be worth hundreds of millions on the street,’ said the man.

‘Crazy Boy isn’t geared up for a drugs deal of that size,’ said Button. ‘But he is chummy with al-Qaeda.’

The man’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re thinking . . .’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘You’re thinking a bomb?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking,’ said Button. ‘But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I trust Spider’s trick memory, of course, but let’s get some details of that container and check that it wasn’t moved during the unloading at Jeddah. We need to contact the ship for a look at their manifest, and see if the people at Southampton can get us some sort of ID on that container.’