Meet the NQGIRAT

L.B. Meet the GIRAT, Left Behind pp. 6-7 and L.B. The Literal Donkey's Penis, Left Behind, pp. 10-15.

(Re: Not Quite Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time)

Peter Marcus lounged in his business class seat in the plane flying toward Europe. Even working for a magazine as prestigious as the National View, he rarely got the chance to fly business class, and was only doing so now because he was marginally a Pan-whatever airline rewards club member and they'd bumped him up due to overbooking.

A pretty brunette stewardess wandered by. They'd just been introduced, but she was already calling him Pete. Everyone did, even former presidents and heads of state. Sometimes it put people at ease, and allowed him to get in questions that they might otherwise have objected to from a more combative reporter.

Technically he was a senior investigative reporter for National Review, but that didn't really mean so much. These days it was better to be a talking head, but Pete wasn't very telegenic, nor did he have a speciality upon which he could B.S. to keep an audience entertained. His specialty were written interviews with minor dignitaries and overseas investigations into corruption. There was never a shortage of either and, although his job could have been a lot more glamorous, it kept him steadily employed.

Sometimes though, he did have the worst luck. Like that time when he was sent to Israel for an interview with a biochemist and Israel had claimed that Russia attacked them. Another competing news magazine, one that Peter was beginning to suspect had no editorial review at all, had reported that Russia had launched a full out assault on the Jewish homeland.

Allied with Ethiopia and Libya.

He'd been sick in the Tel Aviv hospital with food poisoning that night, but he'd see a few flashes through the curtains in his room, and read the report a few days later just before he flew back to the States.

After he'd finished laughing, Peter had called a contact that he had in the Russian government who referred to the incident as a "mistake made during a training exercise" and offered to allow a photographer into a Moscow area military base to prove that Russia did indeed have planes left.

Even the Israeli governments were skeptical about the other magazine's reporting. True, some of the extremely conservative Zionists in the National Religious party called it a miracle of god, but the Kadima run government had pointed out that there hadn't been a single casualty in all of Israel. There had been a few ironic comments by several people that they didn't think the Russians were quite that incompetent, and things had returned to normal.

. . . to be continued with Weird Science. Sorry for the odd post break.