Disclaimer: I don't own Human Target and intend no copyright infringement.
A slight turbulence briefly shook the plane, resulting in some rattling of equipment and luggage, but none of the men paid much attention to it.
"The situation in Cairo is volatile – unrest among the people, the tiniest spark and riots break out. The role of the military is unclear yet, the elected government is weak… " Winston looked up from his notes and threw Guerrero a very dark look. "Vacation, huh?", it said.
Guerrero replied with an unfazed shrug. "By Chance's standards…", it said.
"I've got a guy on the tarmac at Cairo Airport, he'll help us get the mummy through customs", he then explained aloud. "Found a safe place to stow her, too. All that's left is pick a place where to leave her."
"Ilsa is sending an art historian, a classical scholar and an archaeologist. We'll meet them at the Hilton, they'll help us decide." Chance gave Winston the list Ilsa had texted him.
"Whoa, some big names…."
"It helps when there's a Pucci wing in the British Museum, dude."
Chance, however, looked at Winston with newly awoken interest. "You recognize famous archaeologists and art historians by name?"
"Michele bullied me into a San Francisco Friends of the Fine Arts membership."
Now he had Guerrero's interest, too. "Your marriage ended years ago. Must have been ages since you last went to a meeting. And you still recognize those names?"
Winston looked at Chance, hoping for back-up, but he had tilted his head in amused interest. "Anything you'd like to tell us, Winston?"
"Invasion of privacy!", he snarled, rocking back in his seat.
Guerrero scoffed and pulled out his smartphone, apparently going through his contacts. "Don't steal my lines, dude."
"Who will it be, Steven or Ethel?", Chance asked him, grinning broadly and ostentatiously ignoring Winston.
"Ethel belongs to the same church as Michele and she's been a bit late in her payments lately…shouldn't be much of a problem for her to get a dinner invitation that'll lead to a nice chat among girls… "
"You two are unbelievable!" Winston was fuming. "We saw each other at the society's 25th anniversary. Every member was invited. Free buffet! And a lecture from that art historian on Ilsa's list… We didn't go there together, I didn't pick her up, we just ran into each other and… talked… for a while."
"Quite a lot of words to say nothing happened… " Chance was definitely enjoying himself, his eyes were sparkling with mischief.
Winston let out an angry sigh. Thank God the plane was touching down.
… … …
"The stela at Abydos, erected by her grandson, pharaoh Ahmose I, clearly states that they were going to set up a permanent resting place for her in a pyramid." Professor Foster, the classical scholar, practically stomped his feet.
"Apparently all those Greek hieroglyphs from that dubious temple near Rhodes you've lately dedicated so much time to are clouding your judgment. The symbol you're referring to might mean "pyramid", but a translation with "tomb" would be just as possible, and that opens a whole new world of burial sites which at the moment you're blatantly ignoring." Where Prof. Foster was loud, Professor Whitman, the archaeologist, was sarcastic.
"Excuse me? Are you still angry that the research assignment in Rhodes was given to me and not to you?" Professor Foster twirled his moustache indignantly.
"No offense, but some jobs should be left to professionals."
"So being able to use a brush correctly and piece together a couple of ceramic shards makes you an expert? I'm sorry, but how profound is your knowledge in the classical languages again? You might be scoffing at the Greek hieroglyphs at Rhodes, but can you tell a kappa from an omicron?" Professor Foster knew how to use sarcasm, too.
"They are not hieroglyphs! The Greek didn't use hieroglyphs! You can't just call any assembly of pictograms hieroglyphs!"
"Maybe we could come back to the question how to elicit the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyph in question?", Professor Salt, the art historian, dared to chime in.
Both Professor Foster and Professor Whitman tensed up, turned around and bore their eyes into Ilsa's third expert. It hadn't taken Winston, Chance and Guerrero long to realize that "real" historians regard art historians as wannabes who steal research assignments away by speculating about pictures.
"Why don't you share your opinion with us?", Professor Whitman asked Professor Salt with all the friendliness of a snake.
"Well, according to an essay by Rollins and Hepten…"
"Oh, I just knew you'd bring up Rollins and Hepten…"
"Rollins and Hepten, for heaven's sake…"
It was very interesting, seeing Foster and Whitman suddenly join forces, after they'd been at each other's throats only moments earlier.
"If we could maybe agree on a definition of the word "burial site" first, since this is what the gentlemen have been asking for…", Professor Salt made another conciliatory effort.
"I'd suggest we follow Raskel and Herbiger's definition of 1952…" Professor Whitman had the nerve wrecking habit of tapping his pen against the table they were all sitting at.
"Why not the version of 1955?" Professor Foster twirled his moustache again.
"The 1955 version made a blatantly vague use of the word "demesne"!" Professor Whitman tapped his pen so hard against the table, it bounced back, he lost grip of it and it skidded across the floor till it came to a halt at Guerrero's feet. Guerrero picked it up. The look on his face made it very clear that he wasn't planning to give it back.
"There's a fantastic essay by Ossinsky dealing with the various aspects of the demesne term…", Professor Salt tried again.
Chance, however, had enough. He got up, exited the room and took out his cell phone. "Ilsa? The woman in your dream… was there anything special about her?... Yes, except the beetles swarming around her feet… She didn't happen to have an address label attached to her clothes somewhere or something? Take a moment, think about it, then describe her to me."
Meanwhile Winston had joined Chance: "You think Ilsa's dream might help us find out where to put the mummy? Never pictured you as someone believing in supernatural shit."
"Guerrero is this close to start his very own experimental archaeology project and in the end we'll have to get rid of four mummies instead of one."
As if on cue, Guerrero rounded the corner, reading from his smartphone: "Did you know that during the embalming process the brain was taken out with a hook? They stuck it up the nose until it grabbed the brain and then pulled it out through the nostrils." Guerrero bookmarked the webpage.
Chance threw Winston a look: See?
"Maybe we should just go through with our original plan and hand the mummy over to a museum – it would be back in the hands of the Egyptian people then, wouldn't it?", Winston suggested.
"With all the political unrest? It would probably end up in some general's private collection or on Ebay within days… The mummy is a dead person after all, it deserves a permanent resting place, doesn't it?"
Just then Chance's phone rang – Ilsa. She had remembered something.
… … …
A couple of minutes later, Chance stuck his head into the hotel room again. Just in time to see Professor Foster and Professor Whitman jump to their feet, shouting at each other:
"There's no such thing as Egyptian nationalism 1500 BC!"
"The term nationalism is independent of modernity, it can be applied to all epochs!"
Professor Salt, however, was losing his patience, too:
"Nationalism and Enlightenment form an inseparable connection, you cannot…"
"Uh, guys?" Chance stepped into the room to make sure they wouldn't gouge each other's eyes out with their pencils. "A necklace with a green scarab and a golden cobra, eyes made of lapis, most likely, does that somehow help narrow down where the mummy was originally buried?"
"The eastern part of the necropolis in Thebes, they found a wall painting of a woman with similar jewelry there…", Professor Foster said.
"A mastaba with characteristic lion basalt reliefs on the outside…", Professor Whitman added.
"Renewed excavations of the Oriental Institute indicate that the mastaba with the lion is actually a pyramid, just never finished", Professor Salt said. "So actually it would be more appropriate to call the building a…"
"Oh, SHUT UP!", both his colleagues yelled at him.
Chance and the others, however, were already on the move.
So Thebes it would be.