It has been 48 hours since Marty passed and still his poor broken ghost is rattling around the safe house and peering in the window.  He hasn't got to the stage where he'll come in and talk to me but that will come eventually.  At the moment, he's too angry, unable to focus enough to coalesce.  He's not the only one.  Even the living - Frost, Sommers, Parisi - they are all looking ragged to me, the immensity of the task taking its toll.  Only Devereux and strangely enough, Pierce seem to be immune so far.

The past few days have been a blur.  Marty died in the house opposite the clinic, snatched by a waiting shoggoth left to take care of any intruders.  That such a horror could be lurking in the basement of a ruined house on a street where children play makes me feel ill.  Agents Johnson and Frost were with him when he died, pushing the envelope in the usual Martikian manner.  Johnson seemed untroubled but I have seen inside her mind and as her trade is death, I am not surprised.  Frost on the other hand, looked hyper, the remaining threads of sanity beginning to fray.  Sommers was also on scene but not with them when it happened - she took it hard but not for the right reasons.  Echoes of memories firmly suppressed rising to the surface. Stress leads to conflict but what does not kill you makes you stronger.

The meeting with Shakti's mistress went ahead.  She calls herself Sefira and has big cats and bigger zombies for bodyguards.  She seems to work on the principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend' and was willing to offer the team the missing radioactive device as a weapon against the shoggoths.  General consensus was to trust her as far as she could be spat and DG believes she may be the dread Queen Nitocris, consort of the Black Pharoh (one of Nyarlathotep's thousand faces) resurrected.  Another power descending on the Crescent City.

Pierce returned from D.C. yesterday with key elements of B Cell - BARNARD, the fixer and BROOKS, resident magus and occult expert.  ADAM and NANCY from A Cell are also deployed so we have all the big guns in the field.  In the meantime, Tabitha and I are beginning to mesh.  It started with the usual biology (just in record time) but is now advancing rapidly to telepathy and an exchange of arcane knowledge.  This is the first time I have ever known anything like it.

The enemy is on the move.  The past two days we have been watching them - a mid sized van leaves the clinic around 21:00 hrs and heads across the Ponchatrain before turning towards Baton Rouge.  They stay off the freeways and use Highways.  The team successfully tracked them to a truck stop outside Ponchatoula where the van is driven up into a semi and then taken via a circuitous route to a storage facility within a disused rail yard, North of Baton Rouge.  The facility is owned by Pyramid Shipping, an international freight company whose head office is in the Bahamas.  On paper, they appear above board, owned by the Chandler family, old money from the East Coast.  Michael Chandler runs the US operation from Los Angeles.  I am looking through our files for any links to any of our NOLA players but so far, no hits.

ADAM has a plan but it's dangerous.  We have an asset in the local Naval Air station who will earn a dishonourable discharge for releasing a live Maverick missile but we'll need a Laser Designator locked on to the target - the summoning gate, to stop the ceremony.  This means we need to find the ritual location, locate a point from which to fire the LD and hold it until the missile has a lock.  Then run for our lives!

The team are on scene now and Devereux is leading an initial recon into a railway tunnel that runs under a hill for about a mile and a half.  Out of sight, underground and hidden from sight.  Prime location for a ritual of this magnitude.

I see Marty's face in the window, tears rolling down pale cheeks.