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The Orchid Hunter
Sandra K. Moore
Mills & Boon Silhouette
More hunter than botanist, Dr. Jessie Robards had dedicated her life to tracking down the world's rarest flowers.But finding the Death Orchid was different. The legendary medicinal flower could save her dying uncle–if she could keep the precious bloom out of her greedy competitors' hands. But she'd need more than her scientific mind and strong legs to survive the perils of the Amazon. This time the independent adventurer would need the courage to trust a man she barely knew on a journey into the heart of darkness….
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 (http://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.
