The doctor gave her the good news that the treatments were really effective and could virtually eliminate the birthmark. But he had bad news too. He told her that it would take eight to ten treatments to do the job and that she’d have to wait several months between treatments to let her skin heal. The other bad news was the expense, which wasn’t cheap and wasn’t covered by insurance. But Ginny was so excited by the prospect of getting rid of her stain that I nothing else mattered to her.
Anyway, Ginny finished the treatments about a year ago, and they changed her outlook completely. Her self-confidence soared, and she responded by becoming flirty and more outgoing. She also started wearing more revealing clothing now that she didn’t have to hide that birthmark on her shoulder and neck. Of course that began to attract attention from other males. I wasn’t happy about it, but Ginny loved it. She told me it felt great to have people look at her with admiration, not pity. Her new attitude bothered me, but when I tried to say anything she accused me of not letting her enjoy herself. I was glad Ginny was happy so I kept my reservations to myself. You know how well that worked out for me.
Esther looked at me in silence for a long time, and I figured she thought I was a total wimp. Instead, she finally said, “You’re an interesting man, Thomas. You’re not what I expected at all.” Then she stood up abruptly. “We need to get back on the highway. The morning is almost gone and we’ve got a lot of driving ahead of us.”
Although Esther said her arm was better, she still wasn’t comfortable driving so I climbed back behind the wheel. In no time we had left Tennessee and crossed over into Virginia, but we still had nearly eight hours of driving ahead of us.
As we rolled north on I-81, I glanced over at Esther. “So what do you know about the Al Andalus virus? Why are your people so worried about it?” I asked her.
She was all business now. “Our people have been working on it ever since we discovered it, but they haven’t made any progress at all. They thought at first it was some sort of information retrieval routine, something to steal passwords, secret documents, confidential data. But the problem is that the damned thing doesn’t do anything. We’ve quarantined different types of computers and ‘infected’ them with it. The virus runs momentarily, then shuts itself down.”
“Then why are you so worried?” I asked.
“For three reasons,” she said. “First, our people have never seen anything like it. It seems to be very complex and highly sophisticated. No one would go to that much trouble for something innocent. The second reason is that we’re picking up all kinds of back-channel activity from ISIS. Everything we hear seems to indicate that something big is about to happen – we just don’t know what or when. And finally, there’s you.”
“Me?” I said in surprise.
“Exactly,” she said. “When we steered this virus to you, the noise levels peaked and then went silent. Then, the next thing we knew, two very bad types got put on your tail.”
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