On her way home, Emily decided to give Garcia a call. She pushed the button on her dashboard that allowed her to sync her car's stereo system to her phone. Then she told it to call Garcia.

Garcia's apartment was dimly lit, only a couple of lamps had been left on, she was sitting on her purple sofa, wrapped up in a blanket, sipping hot chocolate and watching a movie on DVD when she saw her phone light up. She grabbed it and paused her movie.

"Hey, Em…" Garcia said. Her voice was hoarse and quiet but cheerful.

"Hey you, how you feeling?"

"Terrible...physically, and because I couldn't avoid catching this thing and now I've left you guys without an analyst and I feel really awful about that. I'm sorry…"

"No… Penelope, don't worry about it ok? This kind of thing happens to the best of us once in a while. You know one or two of us gets taken out of commission by something like this every year…"

"Not Reid…"

"Yes well, Reid is germaphobe with mild OCD, this time of year he practically bathes in hand sanitizer and pops zinc and vitamin C tablets like candy. At first I thought he was keeping a roll of lifesavers on his desk but nope…"

That made Garcia laugh. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"I don't know… anyway, don't worry about it… this isn't your fault… so, what are you doing to pass the time?"

"Right now Sergio and I are curled up on the couch watching a movie… he was sleeping above my head but now he's curled up on a pillow at the other end… hey...listen…."

"Garcia, we've been over this. You can't come back for two weeks. It's not up for debate and it's not my decision. Just get some rest, and take care of yourself ok?"

"Ok…" Garcia replied.

"Good, see you in two weeks G…" Emily said, then she hung up.

She'd purposely avoided telling Garcia about Tara, knowing that she wasn't the only one, would've just made her feel worse, and Emily knew it.

The next day, Alvez called in sick… now they were down two profilers and one Garcia…

By noon of that day, Rossi felt like his head was in a vice. Like Garcia before him, Rossi stuck to his office, where is was peaceful and relatively quiet, and where the effects of his throbbing headache were more likely to go unnoticed. The pain was centered on his forehead just above his eyes, this made bright lights and loud noises hard to tolerate, and made if difficult to think straight.

He almost jumped out of his seat when Reid came and knocked on the inside of his office door.

"We have a case." Reid told him.

"O-ok… I'll be right there…"

"Hey...you ok?"

"Y-yeah, of course. Why wouldn't I be? So, what have we got?"

"There's a bomb threat on the site of the local homeschool co-op. Homeland security wants a risk assessment."

Rossi nodded and then the two of them made their way to the conference room where Emily, Matt, and JJ were waiting for them.

"Ok, this morning the 'Natural Kids' homeschool co-op in Reston Virginia, received a bomb threat. 'Natural Kids' is a loose organization of families who homeschool their kids mainly because they don't believe in many aspects of modern medicine. One of the things they reject are vaccines. This is the threat our unsub has made…" Emily clicked a button and a printed note appeared on the plasma screen.

"You all have turned your children into an infection that must be stopped. By not following common sense, you have forced my hand. You and your children will pay the price for wreaking such havoc on society at large out of your own stupidity. Today, before the last school bell rings, a rain of fire and rubble will be your recompense."

"So the unsub is a male, probably a germaphobe, and sees unvaccinated children as the root cause of disease…" Matt reasoned.

"Which in this case just isn't true." Reid added. The others stared at him with looks that said they wanted an explanation as to how he could possibly know that for sure.

"The reason this year's flu outbreak has been so bad is because the main strain this year is an H3N2 strain. H3N2 as a subgroup is really tough to vaccinate against effectively, because it mutates faster than other types of flu Virus, which lowers the effectiveness of the vaccines. Also, H3N2 strains are particularly hard on people who are over the age of fifty because humans do develop particularly strong immunity to viruses that their exposed to as children, but H3N2 strains didn't start showing up in humans until the 1960s, which means that people who were already teenagers and young adults at the time didn't grow up with this type of flu virus in their environment." He explained.

"So the rate of people getting their flu shot or not actually has nothing to do with the epidemic." Rossi commented.

"Not in this instance, no." he replied.

"So we're looking for somebody who, despite a clear interest in human disease and prevention, doesn't understand how flu viruses and vaccines work." JJ added.

"The other thing that strikes me is the threat itself, linguistically it's free from any misspellings or grammar mistakes that are typical of hastily written pranks." Reid replied.

"And the unsub is a personal cause bomber, those guys want the public to take them and whatever message they're trying to send seriously." Emily added.

"It's tough to do that if you don't make good on your threat." Matt replied.

"Which means the threat is most likely genuine." Rossi commented.

"Ok, I'll let Homeland know, and we'll start immediately. Unfortunately, the hardest part of this one is going to be finding and narrowing down our suspect pool without Garcia to create the list and widdle it down." Emily told them.

"Guess we'll just have to do this one the old-fashioned way…" Rossi agreed. He Said that like he was trying to sound as though he was looking forward to it, but it was obvious to all of them that he wasn't as enthusiastic about it as he pretended to be.