Chapter 29: A Reporter Visits

It was cooler in Kobekistan in the autumn, so that was when Tiggs Boush managed to get her editor to pull some strings in the State Department and arrange for the embassy in Kobek to have her allowed in to the country, ostensibly as the significant other of one of the Second Secretaries, since no visitor's visa was forthcoming. She was totally enraged about the treatment of women in Kobekistan even before she arrived, and had already written an exposé of the "shocking lack of civil liberty" in the country. When she was made to wear an abaya on the journey from the airport to the embassy she became incandescent. On learning that she could not go out in the streets of Kobek to interview people at all, even under an abaya, her wrath knew no bounds.

She immediately demanded to see the Ambassador, whom she tried to bully into arranging the affairs of the Embassy in such a way as to enable her to visit the Emir and interview him, preferably on camera. She might have had more success had she not approached the Ambassador with the firm conviction that he was as decadent in his approach to women as she assumed the Emir was; indeed he was obviously dedicated to demeaning and abusing women, after all he was a man. Her other assumption, that the most important facet of his duties was to meet every request of a newspaper reporter no matter how trivial, did not help.