The first response came back from the Palermo Port Authority twenty-three minutes later. Shrek took the call from DR on speaker phone—a company called Rotterdam Associates had applied to import fourteen containers of Scandland water filters from Australia, with a combined weight of two hundred and fifty tonnes of chlorine. The name on the authorisation form was Gina Bolaro. The DR woman cited the local address as 1625 Via Fiammetta.

‘I know it,’ said Shrek. ‘That’s the address for Palermo Commercial Realty—it’s David Lambardi’s firm, the managing agency for the warehouse.’

‘When did this company export the containers out of Palermo?’ asked Shrek.

‘July twenty-eight,’ the woman replied. ‘Fourteen containers, on a ship called Baltic Lady. The freight forwarders were Global Transit Group.’

The team looked at one another.

‘Okay,’ said Shrek. ‘Where was the ship going?’

The woman paused then said, ‘Alexandria Port—Egypt.’

Briffaut had the cooperation of the Italian security services but the paperwork for the chlorine consignment departing the country was accurate and there were no flags.

‘What’s in Egypt?’ asked Briffaut. ‘Why are they shipping there? Is this a Shia–Sunni thing?’

The DR woman then said the consignment had been unloaded from Baltic Lady on the same day it docked.

‘Thanks, keep us updated,’ said Briffaut, ending the call.

He looked around at his team and they got back to Palermo. They quickly established that Gina Bolaro was a false ID, but before they could pursue it further the phone rang.

Lafont picked up. ‘DR again,’ she said, putting the call on speaker.

‘New developments,’ said their woman from DR. ‘Those containers were unloaded in Alexandria and cleared into bond, and then they were loaded again via a new freight forwarder. We only picked it up because Alexandria has RFID readers and our person down there ran a check.’

Briffaut swore softly. ‘Which ship did they go onto?’

‘That’s the thing,’ she said. ‘They went straight back onto Baltic Lady.’

‘Where was it heading?’ asked de Payns.

‘Cadiz and Le Havre,’ she said. ‘It arrived at Le Havre two weeks ago.’

While the arrival of the containers in France was sufficiently distant, that there was nothing to search or seize. They enlisted French customs at Le Havre, who confirmed importation of chlorine water filters from Alexandria via Cadiz on the dates supplied. The containers had been held in bond for fourteen hours at a global freight forwarding operation called Atlas-HK, and when they checked with Atlas the forwarder confirmed that the fourteen containers had been released by a Gina Bolaro and trained to Reims. They could confirm that they were white Hapag-Lloyd twenty-foot containers. From there, the trail became meaningless, with fake names, fake paperwork and fake trucking companies. The containers had already been moved from the Reims’ container hub, where they’d probably been broken down and rebirthed as other cargos, and they could now be anywhere in France or elsewhere in Europe.