The Orchid Hunter

For us, it was an old game:

Me racing to get out of the jungle with my orchids, Lawrence Daley, my one serious rival, racing to catch me and steal what I had in my backpack.

Now, looking down through a break in the midstory’s dense leaves, I noted with some satisfaction that my wait had not been wasted.

“Jessica!” Daley called. What he said next was incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter because anger made him boring. And predictable.

I released the slipknot and plummeted. The rope sang through my gloved fingers. Vines and branches whipped my legs. My boots thumped into the thick forest floor, raising the rich, heady scent of moist earth. The backpack whacked my rump as it caught up. I quickly hauled the remaining rope up and over the branch, then stepped back to let the bitter end slap the ground like a whip.

His hat had fallen back on his neck, the leather strap tight on his throat. His sweaty face was tanner than I remembered, and his blue eyes shone with anger.

“You’d better be careful,” he said. “There are other collectors far more ruthless than I.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why we’re more successful.”

Dear Reader,

You’re about to read a Silhouette Bombshell novel and enter a world full of excitement, suspense and women who stand strong in the face of danger and do what it takes to triumph over the toughest adversaries. And don’t forget a touch of thrilling romance to sweeten the deal. Our bombshells always get their men, good and bad!

Debra Webb kicks off the month with Silent Weapon, the innovative story of Merri Walters, a deaf woman who goes undercover in a ruthless criminal’s mansion and reads his chilling plans right off his lips!

Hold on to your hats for Payback, by Harper Allen, the latest in the Athena Force continuity. Assassin Dawn O’Shaughnessy is out to take down the secret lab that created her and then betrayed her—but she’s got to complete one last mission for them, or her superhealing genes will self-destruct before she gets payback….

Step into the lush and dangerous world of The Orchid Hunter, by Sandra K. Moore. Think “botanist” and “excitement” don’t match? Think again, as this fearless heroine’s search for a rare orchid turns into a dangerous battle of wills in the steamy rain forest.

And don’t miss the twist and turns as a gutsy genius races to break a deadly code, trap a slippery terrorist and steal back the trust of her former CIA mentor, in Calculated Risk, by Stephanie Doyle!

Strong, sexy, suspenseful…that’s Silhouette Bombshell! Please send your comments to me, c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279.

Sincerely,

Natashya Wilson

Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell

The Orchid Hunter

Sandra K. Moore

www.millsandboon.co.uk

SANDRA K. MOORE

has been a technical writer, poet, martial arts student and software product manager, occasionally all at the same time. Although she obtained her master of arts in English from the intensely literary University of Houston Graduate Creative Writing Program, she has happily embraced the fact she’s a commercial fiction writer at heart. She lives on the Texas coast and when she’s not writing action-adventure novels, she can be found hovering over her lone Phalaenopsis, trying to get it to bloom. Visit her on the Web at www.sandrakmoore.com.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Laurie C. Skov, President of Orchids and Tropicals, LLC of Houston, Texas, for his technical information about the fascinating Orchidaceae family; to John E. Erickson for allowing me to use his gorgeous orchid photographs on my Web site; to Heather Giles for her information about the pharmaceutical industry; and to Richard Shepley and Emerson Ricci for their help with the Portuguese. A complete bibliography is available at www.sandrakmoore.com/orchidhunter/. Any outstanding errors of fact are entirely mine.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 1

On the northern ridge of Mount Aiome, not far from the highest point in Papua New Guinea, just inside the province of Madang, a broad stone ledge juts out from a sheer cliff. Carpeted with lichen, the ledge overlooks a handful of majestic emergent hardwoods poking out from the dense canopy of the rain forest below, hardwoods similar to the one a tomboyish woman like me might choose as her vantage point for keeping watch.

She’d be high enough on this ledge and in this tree that on a clear, predawn morning she could see in the far distance, just over the coastal ridge that hid the swamps, the Bismarck Sea’s great darkness. If she waited long enough, the sun would rise over the water and the archipelago islands would gleam like emeralds on a silky topaz bed. The howling nocturnal cacophony would steadily give way to the brighter tones of the dawn chorus. The light mist fingering the treetops would scatter and disappear beneath the sun’s abrupt heat, and the woman might wish she’d worn a lighter-weight pair of canvas pants.

She might also wish she’d used a wider strap to fashion her climbing harness because her ass was, quite literally, in a sling and gone dead as a doornail. After another twenty minutes, she’d wonder if there was any good reason for suspending herself here like bear bait, her backpack full of carefully packed rare plant specimens. A little while later, she’d start wondering if there might be a better way for a woman of her talents to make a living, since she was bored as hell now and her butt was starting to tingle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The truth is I’d been up in the tree for a good hour because Lawrence Daley, my one serious plant-collecting rival, had been tracking me all yesterday and last night. For us, it’s an old game: me racing to get out of the jungle with my orchids, him racing to catch me and steal what I’ve got in my backpack. We’d pretty much been enemies since grad school, when Daley’s idea of a good time had been trying to one-up me with graduate advisors and on lab projects, generally making a nuisance of himself. He craved competition. I craved adventure. I guess that’s why we both gravitated to exotic-plant collecting, the only adventurous, competitive niche in the otherwise ho-hum world of botany.

So I was stuck there, roughly ninety feet up in the canopy in the predawn darkness, my butt starting to tingle. I could have tried climbing down the ledge in the dark, but the nocturnal jungle is far more dangerous than the daylight one, and I’ve had one too many run-ins with boa constrictors, poisonous ants and loose rock to be cavalier about it. Back in the golden age of orchid hunting, the Victorian era, hunters died of dysentery or malaria, or disappeared without a trace, or killed each other over a plant. The killing part had slacked off some, but the rest of the experience was intact. Stay sharp or get dead. I tried to stay sharp.

My plan from here on out was simple. If Daley didn’t show by first light, I’d drop from the canopy and head down the ledge. From there, it was twenty miles to the airstrip where a decrepit Douglas Dakota and a genuine muscle-bound Aussie bush pilot waited for me.

Looking down through a break in the midstory’s dense leaves at the string of utterly silent Maisin natives filing along the path below, I noted with some satisfaction that my efforts had not been wasted, because there, in the back as always, was a white man wearing a ridiculous Australian bush hat, the left brim tacked up in rakish style. I cursed the selfish bastard for abandoning me in Sierra Leone last year after stealing my prize orchid, the luscious Cymbidium archinopsis (or at least what he thought was a prize orchid; I’d actually switched it for the rather pedestrian Cymbidium parthenonae), and my passport (okay, the passport was fake but he didn’t know that, did he? and okay, I’d been wearing my real passport taped to my back but it’d still been tight threading through the paramilitaries and diamond smugglers to get outta there), and then how dare he pretend nothing had happened when I saw him in Stockholm at a private black-tie orchid party two weeks later?

It was enough to make even a well-bred girl want to hock a lugie down on his arrogant head.

This well-bred girl didn’t, though. Instead, I checked my gear.

The rope tied to my climbing harness ran up over an evergreen branch. It came back down where it ran through a stainless steel figure eight at my stomach, and then around my waist to run through a carabiner at the small of my back. It finally got tied to itself in a slipknot at my left side. The remaining rope wound in a loose coil at my belt. I held the business end of the coiled rope in my left hand, and my right hand—the braking hand—tucked comfortably around the rope behind my back. Hanging here all morning wasn’t a problem. Except for the butt-going-to-sleep part.

Now I just needed Daley and his pals to move on down the ridge, discover there wasn’t an easy way off the ledge, and then go back to wherever they had come from. After that, I’d ease down and be on my way, straight down that lovely ledge—the shortest distance from Point A to Point B.

I was still daydreaming about the muscle-bound Aussie pilot when the Maisin spotted me.

Daley barked a sic’em order. The natives swarmed up tree trunks, climbing bare-handed, barefoot, toward me. Daley leaned back to look up.

“Jessica!” he called. “Come on down, luv, and give us the pretty plants.”

I can tolerate almost anything about Lawrence Daley except that affected English accent. Why did a guy from Baltimore feel the need to pretend he was from Blackpool?

“Up yours,” I called down.

“From this angle, it looks more like up yours, luv.” He laughed, hands on his hips. “And a very nice yours it is. What has von Brutten sent you after this time?”

I shrugged, one eye on the natives. “Same old, same old.”

“Cattleya astronomis, perhaps? Dendrobium peristansis?”

“Rudbeckia hirta,” I called back. Wildflower. Black-eyed Susan, to be precise.

“Don’t be a smartass, dahling. We could be a great team—”

“Right, like in Sierra Leone. You nearly got me killed!”

“You’re far too resourceful for that. And look what’s happened since. You’ve been so intent on beating me to the good plants that you leave a trail a mile wide. I can track you anywhere.”

“Correction. The natives can track me anywhere. You can’t find your own ass with both hands and a flashlight.”

“I hear von Brutten’s got a bug in his ear.”

“What? Have you been begging for your old job back? You should know by now that I keep my employer’s little green thumb very happy.”

Daley’s sneer echoed in his cocked hip. “Getting fired by Linus von Brutten was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Sounds like sour grapes. Everybody on the planet knows he’s been the best orchid breeder for decades. Maybe you should have spent more time in grad school thinking about your future instead of how fast and how bad you could screw me over. Speaking of, did you ever get your degree?”

The stiff got even stiffer. “Paper means nothing these days, dahling.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I kinda like having a degree. Keeps my employment options open. How many botanical gardens passed on your résumé, dahling?”

His snort was audible from here. “Collecting for an eminent European orchid breeder is employment enough.”

It should be. Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh had money to burn and an ax to grind with von Brutten. Von Brutten, thanks to my fieldwork and his own high-tech knack for hybridization, had swept top honors at the World Orchid Conference two years running and dumped Thurston-Fitzhugh from her orchid-breeding throne directly onto her glamorous tush. Daley and I were just the latest weapons in a dirty little two-decade war going on underneath the glitz and highbrow of more-money-than-God orchid collecting.

I glanced over. The natives were about halfway up, rustling leaves and scraping bark with bare feet that must have been just as rough. Thank God for Rockports. Watching the climbers made my arches itch.

Daley wasn’t done taunting me yet. “I’m surprised von Brutten hasn’t told you about his heart’s latest desire.”

I waited for him to tell me his rumor about my employer. He always seemed to think that keeping me waiting would make me wet my pants in anticipation. He never learned.

He gave in. “The Death Orchid.”

I burst out laughing. The natives froze and looked at each other, apparently debating the sanity of a white woman, suspended by a rope in the rain forest, cackling her ass off.

The Death Orchid? It was beyond legend. It was myth.

“Debunked!” I shouted down.

Daley’s hat twisted as he shook his head. “O ye of little faith.”

“I’m a scientist. Discredited jungle native accounts of miracle cures do not constitute a clue.”

“Harrison was wrong when he published that report!” Daley shouted.

No way. Terence Harrison was a taxonomic god, my dissertation advisor and mentor my entire grad school career. The man always knew exactly what he was doing. If he said the Death Orchid didn’t exist, it didn’t.

“Harrison proved everyone in the orchid-collecting community was nuts,” I shouted back. “Except me. I didn’t believe those rumors were true. That supposed Death Orchid he tested wasn’t some kind of miracle cure and he proved it. Scientifically. In a lab!”

Daley stamped a few steps away, then back. “Harrison lied!”

“Willful ignorance is the last bastion of the faithful. Harrison’s too straitlaced to lie and you know it. Do the facts confuse you? Or does Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh just hate losing to my boss so much she’s convinced you this crap is true?”

“Connie has reason to believe—”

Connie? I laughed, interrupting him. “On a first name basis with your employer?”

Daley stopped pacing and shoved his hat back from his forehead. I couldn’t see the grin, but I could the signs of one in his cocky stance. “I’m doing rather well in the bedroom, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The Maisin were close enough now to distinguish as individuals. Time to think about leaving.

“You’re all talk, Larry.” I unhooked the coil of rope at my belt and held it loose in one hand, ready. “Do you suppose she fakes it like your girlfriends in school?”

“You little—” The rest was incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter because anger made him boring. And predictable. And American.

A rail-thin native, a jet-black adolescent wearing fierce ocher and white face paint, a necklace made of oyster shells, and a pair of department-store shorts, grasped the branch below my dangling feet. I raised one boot as his chin came level with the branch. He looked at the beefy no-nonsense sole, then at me. I shook my head at him. Behind me, the others scrambled across narrow branches. They were closing in and I really didn’t want to break this young man’s nose. His deep brown eyes—I’m a sucker for brown eyes—widened.

I glanced down. Daley waited. Alone.

Dumbass.

I released the slipknot and plummeted. The rope sang through my gloved fingers. Vines and branches whipped my legs as I dropped through the midstory leaves. Above me, the natives fell into the sky. Below me, Daley’s mouth hung open in his usual expression of slack-jawed surprise. I gradually tightened my grip over the last twenty feet, slowing. My boots thumped into the thick forest floor, raising the rich, heady scent of moist earth. The backpack whacked my rump as it caught up. I quickly hauled the remaining rope up and over the branch, then stepped back to let the bitter end slap the ground like a whip.

“Leave me the hell alone,” I grated at Daley, rapidly coiling the rope over my bent arm.

His hat had fallen back on his neck, the leather strap tight on his throat. His sweaty face was more tan than I remembered, and his blue eyes shone with anger.

“You’d better be careful,” he said. “There are other collectors far more ruthless than I.”

“Yeah.” I glanced at the natives struggling to hurry down without killing themselves. “That’s why we’re more successful than you.”

“Give it to me.” He made a grab at my backpack’s left shoulder strap.

Hopping back out of reach, I slapped his hand away. “Why don’t you dig your own orchids for a change instead of trying to steal mine? It didn’t work at school and it hasn’t worked since.”

I strode to the ledge and quickly fed my climbing rope around the stout and stubby palm tree I’d scoped earlier. I backed over the edge. Just as I started seeing rock instead of foliage, I heard the first of the Maisin hitting the forest floor. Their feet pattered on lichen. Broad brown faces peered over the edge.

Kicking off from the cliff, I touched the rock here and there. It was a long way down to the lowland rain forest but there was no need to hurry.

“Come on, luv!”

The warning tone in Daley’s voice made me look up. He lay facedown on the ledge, arms extended, pistol aiming. “Get back up here!”

Would he shoot me? I doubted it, but I shortened my strides anyway, darting back and forth in an irregular pattern while letting miles of rope slide through my fists. Daley’s shooting sucked but I’d made him mad, and some people’s aim got better when they were pissed. Tree branches raced toward me. I couldn’t see the ground. There was only the dark, mottled green of trees waking up as I crashed through the canopy on the lower ridge.

Several more feet, and the end of climbing rope not tied to my harness slipped through my braking right hand. I clamped down hard on the bitter end with my left hand, nearly yanking my arm out of its socket. Two hundred feet of rope and it was too short. Way too short. Dangling like bait on a hook, I glanced up through the leaves. The more intrepid Maisin pursuers leaned far over the cliff, looking for handholds. One had pulled his machete and was hacking away at my climbing rope. Daley took aim. Doing a buttplant on the forest floor didn’t sound like much fun but, as I reflected before letting go, it might be something I could tell my grandkids.

Two branches clipped my shoulder, then I broke through leaves like an airplane descending through clouds. Almost immediately my feet hit thick moss and I rolled hard for some distance. Either I’d fallen the last couple of dozen feet really fast or, more likely, I’d fallen five feet through the leaves of a short but elegant ficus. As I was still conscious enough to register landing pain in my shins, I gathered it was the latter.

I sat up. No nausea, no concussion. Not yet, anyway. With any luck, the rare orchids in my pack weren’t concussed, either.

A whistling hiss warned me to scoot to my right. The climbing rope shot down through the midstory, undeterred by the branches, and slapped the ground a foot away, raising a huge cloud of murky dust that danced in the filtered sunlight. I looked around to make sure the hissing I’d heard had merely been the rope. Nothing slithered.

Ignoring the days-old stink of rotting mammal from somewhere nearby, I tested fingers, toes, arms, legs and shoulders. All good. All ready to go, if a little sore. I coiled the rope and tied it off. The high-speed drops and the machete action had rendered it unsafe, but I live by a simple rule: pack in, pack out.

As I threw the coil over my head and shoulder, I spotted the remains of what looked like a canopy-dwelling spider monkey, its neck definitely broken. I preferred to think of it as a “lesson” rather than as a “warning.” Thank you, God.

Above, I could hear Daley shouting instructions at the Maisin. It sounded like they were fed up and ready to go home. If Daley had a map, he might be able to find his way to the airstrip. I didn’t need a map. And from my survey of the area, I knew it’d take him four hours to get down to me by way of the southwestern trail. Unless he wanted to free-climb down the sheer cliff face.

If I knew Daley, he didn’t and wouldn’t.

“Up. Freaking. Yours!” I shouted to him, and headed north-north-east for the airstrip and my muscle-bound Aussie.

Had my great-uncle Scooter ever bothered to put any money into it, the Slapdash Bar and Grill could have been a full step above the average East Texas honky-tonk it was. The dilapidated front porch showed Scooter’s optimistic view that a good time didn’t mean you couldn’t navigate three tilting steps down to the parking lot. These same steps seemed, as I put my pickup’s nose to the hitching rail out front, to be complicating the efforts of a drummer hoisting his gear onto the porch. His next obstacle was the life-size, paint-flaked wooden palomino pony just outside the front door. And I’m sure there’s some law against having an attached firing range, but the local sheriff hadn’t yet seen fit to enforce any regulations and in fact he was knocking back a Bud by the jukebox when I threaded past the sweating drummer and stepped inside.

“Jessie!” Hank boomed, standing to bear hug the air out of me. What little breath I had left at the end got hijacked by his aftershave. “About time you came home.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said.

He slammed his beer bottle down on the worn oak table and looked at me, his gray eyes warm with affection. “It’s good to see you again, little girl.”

I set my brown paper bag, containing a glad-to-see-you present for Scooter, on the floor. “I haven’t been gone that long.”

“Been over six weeks.” A frown’s shadow crossed his tanned forehead but disappeared almost immediately. “What’d you do to your hair?”

I guiltily ran a hand through it. “Long and red didn’t suit me. Shorter and brown’s better for my line of work.”

“Didn’t suit you, my ass.”

“I’d shave it all off if I had the nerve.”

Hank grinned. He knew I wouldn’t, but it’d give him something to rib me about later.

“Scooter around?” I asked.

“Don’t you go nowhere. I’ll fetch him.” He stalked his broad frame up to the bar where Marian, the homely blond barkeep, did her best not to pass out from lust. The fact Hank was pushing fifty didn’t seem to bother her twenty-something hormones. But, as Scooter liked to say, every pot has a lid.

What he meant was, every pot except the ones he used in the back to cook up his four-alarm chili. Hell, if he had more than a ladle and six spoons in the kitchen I’d be surprised. He’d probably worn his trademark black-iron pot down to tinfoil thickness by now.

And he wouldn’t let me replace the damn thing with a new one. A stickler about borrowing, he’d nearly had a heart attack when I’d told him I was going to get a student loan to pay for school. Hank and I had a tough row to hoe when we talked him out of selling the Slapdash to pay for my education. Hell, it wouldn’t have covered much more than tuition and books for the first two years, anyway. The money I’d made working for von Brutten let me pay off the entire loan in a year and two months.

Hank cracked the kitchen door and shouted, “Scooter! Your lady friend’s home!”

Looking around at the clean, well-worn tables, the gleaming bar, the glittering beer mugs, and the black-and-white photos of who knows whom on the walls, I felt the first thrill of seeing him again. This place was so like him—beat-up and characterful and comforting—where you could go and feel at ease and let the world slip by outside.

Being with Scooter always felt safe. When I first came to live with him after my parents died, he made me feel like I belonged here. Even though he didn’t have kids of his own, Scooter somehow knew how to guide me through my parents’ deaths in that car accident. It felt like he’d always be here, always just through the kitchen door, no matter what else was going on in my life.

I guess I was about nine when he blindfolded me and took me into the middle of a neighbor’s cornfield. He set me down between two rows and told me to count to a thousand, then take off my blindfold and come home. Maybe I counted to a thousand or maybe not, but I remember pulling off that navy-blue bandanna, squinting into the bright noon sky, surrounded by the smell of hot corn leaves going dry with summer sun, and thinking, “I better go that way.” Thirty minutes later, I was back at the Slapdash, not knowing how I’d known where I was or where I ought to head. I was just glad Scooter was waiting for me on the front porch with a glass of cold grape Kool-Aid and a hug. He’d patted my head and chuckled, then bragged about how sharp and capable I was to all his friends that night as they sat around the gleaming mahogany bar.

Now, beside the bar, Hank swung the kitchen door wider and Scooter barreled through, shoving his walker out in front of him like a battering ram. Two shuffling steps, shove. Two shuffling steps, shove. I noticed immediately the hair sticking out from under the baseball cap had silvered a lot. His face, a dull gray under a surface flush of either excitement or freshly chopped jalapeños, broke into the broad, toothy grin I remembered from the day I came to live with him. I’d been seven then and the teeth had been real.

When he cleared the door, I went to him and hugged him over the walker, feeling his loose-skinned old-man shoulders through his plaid cotton shirt. Two-day stubble scratched my ear and his arms tightened shakily around my back as he said, “Well, well. How ’bout that.” He smelled like garlic and mothballs and spearmint. If I could bottle that scent I’d remember him forever.

“Hello, old man,” I said.

“’Bout time you came back. I thought you’d done forgot me.” He winked one watery hazel eye to show me he didn’t mean it. “Marian! Bring my girl a beer.”

“What’ll you have?” she called.

“Saint Arnold.”

“You