Get them to acknowledge their crimes. It’s the only way to stop these deaths.

This was something else, Cindy was thinking. The writer was reaching out. Maybe a sliver of guilt, or reason, holding back the insanity.

I can tell you want to stop this insanity,

Cindy wrote.

Please, tell me what’s going to happen. No one has to get hurt!

Nothing. No further reply came.

“Shit!” Cindy pounded the keyboard. They were using her, that’s all. To get their message out.

She typed:

Why did Jill Bernhardt have to die? What crime did she commit? Stealing oil? Globalization? What did she do?

A full thirty seconds elapsed. Then a minute. Cindy was sure she had lost the messenger. She shouldn’t have gotten mad. This was bigger than her anger or her grief.

She finally rested her head against the monitor. When she looked up, she couldn’t believe it. More words had appeared.

Jill Bernhardt didn’t have anything to do with G-8. This one wasn’t like the others. This one was personal, the message read.

Something terrible was going to happen today. Cindy’s latest e-mail assured us of that. And her strange pen pal hadn’t been wrong yet, hadn’t misled her or lied.

It was a sickening, helpless feeling to watch the dawn creep into the sky and know: in spite of all the resources of the U.S. government, all the fancy vigilance and warnings and cops we could put out on the street, all my years of solving homicides … August Spies were going to strike today. We couldn’t do a thing to stop the killers.

That dawn found me in the city’s Emergency Command Center, one of those “undisclosed locations” hidden in a nondescript cinder-block building in a remote section of the naval yard out in Hunter’s Point. It was a large room filled with monitors and high-tech communications equipment. Everyone there was on edge. What were August Spies going to pull now?

Joe Molinari was there. The mayor, Tracchio, the heads of the fire department and Emergency Medical Task Force, all of us crammed around the “war table.”

Claire was there, too. The latest warning had everyone freaked out that this new attack could be a widespread one involving ricin. Molinari had a toxins expert on alert.

During the night we had decided to release Hardaway’s name and description to the press. So far we hadn’t been able to locate him, and the situation had only gotten exponentially worse. Murder had given way to public safety. We were certain that Hardaway was involved somehow and that he was extremely dangerous.

The morning news shows came on. Hardaway’s face was the lead story on all three networks. It was like some nerve-racking doomsday countdown straight out of a disaster movie, only much worse. The thought that any minute in our city a bomb could go off or a poison be spread, maybe even by plane.

By seven, a few of the inevitable Hardaway sightings had started to trickle in. A clerk was sure he’d seen him in Oakland at an all-night market two weeks ago. Other calls came from Spokane, Albuquerque, even New Hampshire. Who knew if any of them were for real? But all the calls had to be checked out.

Molinari was on the phone with someone named Ronald Kull, from the WTO.

“I think we should issue some kind of communiqu?,” the deputy director pressed. “No admissions, but say that the organization is considering the grievances, if they show a cessation of violence. It’ll buy us time. It could save lives. Maybe a lot of lives.”

He seemed to have gotten some agreement and said he would draft the language. But then it had to be approved, by Washington and by the WTO.

All this red tape. The clock ticking. Some kind of disaster about to strike at any moment.

Then, like the e-mail foretold, it happened.

At 8:42 A.M. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time of day.

Kids had been drinking from a water fountain at the Redwood City Elementary School. They got sick… Those were the first chilling words that we heard.

Every heart in the room slammed to a stop at the same time. 8:42. Within seconds, Molinari was patched through to the principal of the school. A decision was made to evacuate it immediately. Claire, who had strapped on a headset, was trying to get through to the EMS vehicle carrying the kids who had gotten sick.

Never before had I seen the most capable people in the city so utterly panicked. Molinari carefully instructed the principal: “No one touches the water until we get there. The school has to be cleared right now.”

He ordered an FBI team on a copter down to Redwood City. The toxicology expert was hooked right into our speakers.

“If it’s ricin,” he said, “we’re going to see immediate convulsions, massive broncho-constriction, with intense, influenza-like symptoms.”

Claire had gotten patched through to the school nurse. She identified herself and said, “I need you to carefully describe the symptoms the children are showing.”

“I didn’t know what it was,” a frantic voice came back. “The kids were suddenly weak, showing signs of severe nausea. Temperatures were almost a hundred and four. Abdominal pain, throwing up.”

One of the emergency copters had already gotten to the school and was circling, relaying film from above. Children were rushing out of the exits, guided by teachers. Frantic parents were arriving on the scene.

All of a sudden, a second report crackled over the airwaves. A worker had collapsed at a construction site in San Leandro. That was on the other side of the bay. They didn’t know if it was a heart attack, or something ingested.

As we tried to follow up, a news flash broadcast came over one of the monitors: “Breaking news … In Redwood City, the local elementary school has been evacuated after children were rushed to a nearby hospital, having collapsed, showing signs of violent sickness, possibly related to a toxic substance. This, on top of broadcast alerts of possible terrorist activity today …”

“Any more reports of illness from the school?” Molinari spoke into the phone.

“None yet,” the principal replied. The school was completely evacuated. The helicopter was still circling.

Suddenly a doctor from the ER gave us an update. “Their temperatures are one oh three point five to one oh four,” the doctor reported. “Acute nausea and dyspnea. I don’t know what’s causing it. I’ve never had experience with this sort of thing before.”

“You need to take immediate mouth and nasal swabs to determine if they were exposed,” the toxins expert was instructing. “And chest X-rays. Look for any kind of bilateral infiltrates.”

Claire cut in. “How are the pulmonary functions? Breathing? Lung activity?”

Everyone waited anxiously. “They seem to be functioning,” the doctor reported.

Claire grabbed Molinari’s arm. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t think this is ricin,” she said.

“How can you be sure?”

Claire had the floor. “Ricin attacks through a necrosis of the vascular cells. I saw the results. The lungs would already be starting to degrade. Also, ricin has a four-to-eight-hour incubation period, does it not, Dr. Taub?” she asked the toxicology expert on the line.

The expert begrudgingly agreed.

“That means they would’ve had to have been exposed during the night. If the lungs are symptom-free, I don’t think it has anything to do with that water. I don’t know if this is some kind of staph attack, or strychnine.… I don’t think it’s ricin.”

The minutes passed slowly as the doctors in Redwood City ran through the first series of diagnostic tests.

An EMS team was already on the scene in San Leandro. They reported that the construction worker there was having a heart attack and had been stabilized. “A heart attack,” they repeated.