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 want a mug?”

“Nah.”

Scooter gestured to a table close to the kitchen. “You tell me where you’ve been this time.” He let Hank guide him into a wide-backed chair sporting a seat cushion. So Scooter had finally broken down and set himself up a receiving table. Hank settled in at Scooter’s right hand.

“I’ll do better than just tell you.” I set the brown paper bag on the chair next to me and took out Phalaenopsis donerii, a delicate beauty whose petals gleamed a pure, bright yellow. The lip—the insect pollinator’s landing platform—resembled a leopard’s skin, dark brown and golden. “Fresh from Micronesia,” I said. “She’s small, but she’s fertile. I made sure of that before I turned her siblings over to the boss.”

Scooter’s liver-spotted hand stopped trembling as he touched the plant’s shiny leaves. Just like some stutterers can sing flawlessly, so his hands became steady as a rock around an orchid.

“Wide leaves. Understory t’rrestrial,” he murmured, turning the pot gently. “Monopodial. Better not keep your feet wet, lovely girl.” His fingers lightly traced her lines. “What pests?”

“The usual. And spider mites on the underleaves.”

“Pollinator?”

“The male leopard moth. She blooms for two weeks before the female moths hatch.”

“So the gents make love to her until their lady friends show up.” He shook his head. “Somethin’ else, ain’t it?”

“Timing is everything,” I admitted.

“This is the prettiest since my Laelia anceps. My first orchid.” His voice softened. “Long time ago now.”

“What about the Draculas I brought you last year? Or the Brassia verrucosa the year before that?” I’d nearly broken my neck for the blood-red Brassia.

“There ain’t nuthin’ like the first.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t. His eyes sharpened when he tore his gaze from his orchid to look at me. “Couldn’t catch me a couple of moths?”

“You know I don’t do moths. I’m only licensed for plants.”

He nodded. “Appendix One?”

He was referring to the CITES, pronounced sigh-tees, regulations about transporting animal and plant products across international borders. Had I been caught in customs with Scooter’s little Phalaenopsis, I’d be in jail and facing a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. It would have been fun because I’d had four of them packed in my luggage at the time.

I shrugged, noncommittal. Best I not admit to anything in front of Hank, who was, after all, the law. Better for Scooter, too. U.S. Fish and Wildlife raids on orchid growers, even here in the free United States of America, weren’t unknown. Heck, a well-respected Florida botanical garden got nailed a few years ago because they neglected to tell Fish and Wildlife they were preparing to formally register the previously undiscovered Phragmipedium kovachii.

Abruptly, Scooter smiled. “Good girl,” he murmured.

I swigged my ice-cold Saint Arnold while my gut warmed with pleasure. Getting rare orchids into the States under the noses of customs and wildlife agents satisfied us both—me because of the challenge and ultimate monetary payoff from von Brutten, and Scooter because he was a true conservationist.

Scooter had explained to me how the CITES rules worked when I first decided at the ripe old age of ten I wanted to find orchids for a living. It’s simple. You can’t take a plant listed in CITES Appendix One out of its country of origin. It doesn’t matter whether you want to conserve it, study it or clone it. It doesn’t even matter if everybody knows that same country of origin is about to bulldoze the last one under to build a road. That plant can be the only one in existence, and CITES won’t let someone like me save it by taking it out of the country. It’s just one of those things: good intentions gone bad.

Scooter got me started on orchids with his collecting hobby, but I’ve never had the love of the things he does. I like the grittier side. Ever since he told me the horror stories about the Victorian hunters—Roezl losing his arm but tramping across the Americas for the sake of a single orchid, the intrepid von Warscewicz hunkering down in the wildest Colombian floods with his foul-smelling guide—I’ve wanted to be a field collector. For me, it’s the chase, the challenge. If I have only the foggiest idea of what I’m looking for, nothing grabs my gut more than trying to track it down in the middle of a choking jungle. And the tougher the job, the better.

“What else you got for me, Ladybug?” he asked.

I spread five plastic sleeves across the table like a winning flush. As I named the powdery seeds inside them, Scooter’s smile got wider and wider until I thought his jaw must hurt.

“Marian!” he called. “Take these into the greenhouse office for me.”

“The plant, too?” she asked, sweeping up the sleeves.

“No.” He caressed the orchid’s pot with a tremorless hand. “I wanna look at it for a while.” He raised his liquid gaze to my face. “I’m glad you came to see me, Ladybug.”

“Me, too, Scooter.”

An hour later, I watched Scooter row himself to the office for his late-afternoon nap. Marian hovered over him like a hummingbird, carrying his orchid.

“His Parkinson’s is getting worse,” I said to Hank, “and his color’s bad. His skin’s gone gray. He was barely stage three when I left and now he seems like he’s gone all the way to stage four. Have you talked him into seeing the specialist yet?”

Hank tapped his beer bottle on its coaster. “You managed to do that your last visit.” He took a deep breath, his barrel chest broadening under a short beard just starting to grizzle, his craggy face grim.

“Thank God. One more trip to that witch doctor and I thought he’d start howling at the moon.”

“He’s dyin’, Jess.”

I waited a few seconds for him to add just kiddin’. Or to say that we’re all dying and Scooter is seventy-four, after all, so he’s just a little ahead of the game.

But when he continued, Hank said, “The doctors gave him a cocktail that was supposed to help the Parkinson’s, but it’s damaged his heart.”

“Okay, so they can fix that—”

“It’s irreversible.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes. “Is that what the cardiovascular surgeon said?”

“It’s what a team of specialists—heart surgeons and neurologists—said.”

“They took an oath,” I protested. “What happened to ‘do no harm’?”

“They did their best.”

“No, they didn’t. They broke him.” My gut tightened. I knew the question to ask, but waited until I wouldn’t cry when I asked it. “How long?” I said finally.

“A month at the outside.”

After the next wave of pain passed, I asked, “What are they going to do?”

Hank shook his head, squeezing my hand once before letting go. “Nothin’. He’s too old.” Before I could get up a good head of steam, he added, “He wouldn’t let ’em do anything about it now even if they wanted to. You know him.”

“Yeah, I do. He’d rather waste his time and money carrying around rabbit’s feet and drinking herbal concoctions Old Lady Fenster cooked up in her backyard than take a vitamin.” I shoved away from the table and stood. “I need to have a talk with that old bat.”

Hank grabbed my arm. “Don’t, Jess. There’s nothin’ wrong with what she was doing. It may not have helped him, but it didn’t hurt him none, neither.”

“Didn’t hurt him? You mean when he didn’t go to the doctor early enough to get help or when she gave him false hope that she could stop the Parkinson’s?”

“It’s Scooter’s choice. It always has been.”

His grip felt like iron, completely unlike Scooter’s feeble grasp earlier. The contrast made my throat ache. “She had no right filling his head with that crap,” I said. “If he’d listened to me years ago and gone to a doctor then, they could have prescribed L-dopa to slow the symptoms.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Hank replied, his voice soft. He let go of me as I sat back down to listen. “This drug treatment they gave him is in trials.”

I stared at him for a moment while my brain struggled to work. “He let them experiment on him?”

“Only because he’s already so far gone. But now they know more about the side effects—”

“Let me get this straight,” I snapped. “The doctors turned a non-life-threatening disease into a death sentence because they wanted to test a cocktail that hasn’t seen FDA approval yet. And when that clinical trial failed, they decided to wash their hands of him and let him die because he’s old. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Hank’s shuttered expression told me I was wasting my breath. He was a bottom-line kind of guy, but I guess the bottom line I’d reached didn’t sit well with him.

“Look,” I argued, “I just wanted him to see if anything could be done. Not to throw himself into a bad science experiment.”

Hank nodded thoughtfully with the air of a parent letting his ten-year-old finish up a tantrum. It pissed me off. I clutched my sweat-slick beer bottle as he said, “He’s a grown man, Jessie. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. It’s not up to you to go tearing up Old Lady Fenster or parade over to San Antone to yell at the doctors. Especially since he’s been workin’ with ’em ever since you left.”

My radar went off. San Antonio wasn’t the Parkinson’s capital of Texas. Houston was.

“Talk to me about San Antone,” I said, shedding my anger a hair. “Why’d he go there?”

Hank toyed with a coaster. I knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of his mouth. “Your great-uncle decided last year he’d check into a cure on his own. He found a lab that was workin’ on one and talked to ’em.”

My heart sank. “Don’t tell me. They agreed to make him a guinea pig.” At his nod, I added, “And he chose them because they’re using an extract of some damned insect saliva in the formula.”

Hank looked at his hands as he said, “They’re still workin’ on the cure. The head guy at the lab, Dr. Thompson, he said the drug had been tested on mice okay. The San Antone fellas just need a little more time.”

I got mad all over again. “It doesn’t sound like they have time. What’s this outfit called?”

“Cradion Pharmaceutical.”

“And they’re hooked up to Scooter’s regular doctors how?” I demanded.

“They offered the trial drug and assigned Dr. Thompson to his case. His G.P. just oversees his checkups.”

“Did his insurance pick up the cost?”

“Not much of it. The Slapdash is mortgaged up to its neck.”

I bit my lip. Damned old fool and his damned fool ideas. “He should’ve paid a hit man. It would’ve been cheaper and faster.”

“Ever’body did their level best, Jessie. Sometimes it just don’t work out.”

“I should have tried harder.”

“We all could have.”

“No. I mean I should have gone to court, got him declared incompetent, and then put him in decent care when he was first diagnosed. I should have been here to make sure the doctors were going to help him, not hurt him.”

Hank stared at me, mouth tightening with what might have been anger. “He’d never forgive you for doing that to him. You got no call to be trying to run his life when he’s still kickin’ around like a mean old hoss.” His bearded chin stuck out a little as he said, “He wouldn’t have tried to tell you what to do.”

I waited for Hank to finish. Behind him, the band’s guitar player slipped the strap over his head and twanged a string, prompting a pretty brunette in tight jeans and boots to drag her man onto the scraped-up dance floor. A group of cowboys in the corner laughed over a hand of cards.

When Hank ran out of things to say, I stood. “See you around.” I headed for the door.

“Jessie,” he warned.

“It’s okay. I won’t bother anybody.” I threw a few bucks on the bar for Marian on my way out.

On the porch, cool wind brushed my cheeks. Only then did I feel the sticky wetness of tears. The man I knew as a father was dying because he was too stubborn to do anything else. A homeopath had given him false hope and some bogus pharmaceutical company had made him a guinea pig and thanked him for it by killing him.

But I was the one who hadn’t been here. I hadn’t done what needed to be done.

If anybody had put the first nail in Scooter’s coffin, it was me.

Chapter 2

Hammarbya paludosa. The Bog Orchid. Officially extinct in Britain, the last wild one had been stolen in December of 2001 from a secret site in the Yorkshire Dales and sold on the black market, probably for around ten grand.

Normally when you think of orchids, you think of the gorgeous, vibrantly colored petals of Phalaenopsis, or the pure seduction of Paphiopedilum, commonly known as lady’s slipper. Orchids are the most blatantly sexual flowers of any on earth, rampant in their attractions, decadent in their enticements.

The Bog Orchid is a runt. It’s a dull stunted foxglove of an orchid—long spikes studded with greenish, waxy-looking leaves that are actually flowers. Ugly thing.

Kew Gardens never succeeded in reproducing it despite their best efforts. There may be a few in Northern Ireland, but no one’s saying if or where.

Most orchid collectors have a couple of rare orchids like this one to trot out at flowering parties and green their guests with envy. The idea is to have lots of different orchids to show one’s taste, one’s style, one’s sensibilities.

Linus Geraint Newark von Brutten III has over fifty Bog Orchids.

I knew because in the thirty minutes I’d been kept waiting in Building 6, I’d counted them: fifty-seven ugly plants, fifty-seven ugly flowering spikes, 942 ugly flowers.

Tardiness is the privilege of the billionaire who feeds me. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind. It kept us honest; we always knew where we stood. But von Brutten had pulled me away from Scooter, and I was ready to get this show on the road. In the time I’d not been counting, I’d been mulling over how to tell him I wasn’t going on a fishing expedition for him, at least not while Scooter was still around.

“Dr. Robards.”

I turned. A bow-tied, black-jacketed butler stood in the greenhouse’s doorway. His high forehead sprouted a light humidity sheen. The Bog Orchid does need, after all, a bog.

“Hullo, Sims,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He bowed. “Mr. von Brutten requests your presence in the morning room.”

Well, hell. That’d be a twenty-minute walk. “Then why did he send me here when I arrived?”

“I am afraid I cannot say, Dr. Robards, but I am sorry for the inconvenience.”

I wondered if all butlers were taught to speak without either expression or gesticulation. Sims might be being truthful about what he didn’t know, or he might not, and I’d never know. Couldn’t help but like the guy. “Lead on,” I said.

Von Brutten’s estate, fancifully called Parsifal, was a sprawling thousand-acre ranch fetched up against a low ridge about an hour outside Spokane, Washington. The ranch had two lakes and a great view of the Columbia River. I’d been in about half of von Brutten’s greenhouses, Buildings 1 through 9. The other half he kept to himself. It rankled, not being trusted. But if I’d been robbed blind for my plants as often as he had, I might be a little picky about my buddies, too. The only reason I knew those greenhouses were there was because I’d seen the satellite photos. Sometimes it helps to date the right people.

When it came down to it, as much as I hated to admit it, I owed Daley for getting me this job. My first year out of grad school, I managed to track down Cattleya turneris in Costa Rica, a rare blue orchid the year blue was all the rage in collecting circles. Plucked it right out from under Daley’s nose, in fact. I got the call from von Brutten within a day of arriving back in the States: he wanted to hire me as Daley’s replacement. “Daley,” von Brutten had breathed over the phone line, “has not lived up to expectations.” I’d been collecting for von Brutten ever since.

The morning room faced east, and light cast down through the glass roof for only a couple of hours. I liked this room because it opened onto a little shade garden surrounding an irregularly shaped man-made pond. Von Brutten’s orders must have been to make the garden look like a jungle, with its bowing palms and water-loving bromeliads. It didn’t. This garden looked like a place you’d want to rest in, maybe take a nap.

The word jungle is from the Sanskrit jangala, meaning “impenetrable.” The jungle smothers you with noise and odors and fear. Its trees tower, woody vines dangle, insects bite, birds screech, monkeys howl, jaguars stalk, and the whole time heat rises through the air like somebody threw water on a griddle. You don’t penetrate the jungle. It penetrates you.

“Dr. Robards,” Sims announced, his deep voice echoing under all the glass.

Were he true to the stereotype, von Brutten would have been huddled over a Dendrobium, clutching a watering can and muttering diabolically to himself about humidity. Instead, he relaxed his small, elegantly suited frame into a Lucien Rollin chair and smiled a frosty smile over his silk jabot.

“Dr. Robards,” he breathed. “Please, sit and enjoy a little something.” He snapped his fingers. Food and juice appeared, carried by silent bow-tied wait staff.

“Just tea for me, thanks.”

A French press of tea sat at my elbow. Poof. Just like that. Maybe money was the secret of Houdini.

“Did you enjoy your flight?”

“I always enjoy the Lear, thanks,” I said. “Very nice.”

While we traded meaningless social niceties, I studied him. His pale, even features seemed vaguely threatening in repose, but I’d gotten used to that. He resembled the guy who’d share his last smoke with you before smiling benignly and dropping you headfirst into a shark tank. Small eyes, aquiline nose, a thin-lipped mouth, a closely trimmed goatee. In some circles he might be considered genteelly attractive. I didn’t move in those circles. As far as I knew, there was no Mrs. von Brutten, nor was there a boy-toy wandering around. Von Brutten appeared to be either extremely celibate or extremely circumspect.

Or maybe he just got his rocks off pollinating nearly extinct orchid species.

After he asked me a polite question about my limo ride from Spokane to Parsifal, I realized he was desperately excited about something.

The more excited he was, the less likely he was to act that way. But I needed him to hurry up so I could get back to Scooter. The trick was to hustle him up without appearing to want to.

“Your jet’s much nicer than the crate I took out of Micronesia,” I said casually. I wished I smoked, so I could blow a stream negligently into the air while glancing away.

“A successful trip.” His hand strayed in the general direction of Building 3, where the siblings to Scooter’s Phalaenopsis were being studied in a high-tech laboratory.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Did you…have fun…in Micronesia?”

I shrugged carelessly. “I ran into Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh’s errand boy.”

“And you took care of him.”

“He came away empty-handed, as usual.”

A smile fled across von Brutten’s silvery eyes.

I waited. You can’t push someone like von Brutten too hard. And he was enjoying my news too much for me to rush him. Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh had consistently beaten him to the punch until I came along, and von Brutten had made sure I knew he was pleased with my performance. My ability to outwit and outcollect the handful of professional field collectors in the world meant von Brutten stayed top dog in the insulated and obsessive world of ultra-high-dollar orchid collecting. We had a gentleman’s agreement: he paid me generously and I didn’t work for anyone else.

The ten or so other professionals tended to freelance, sometimes for private collectors like von Brutten and sometimes for legitimate botanical institutions. Not that the institutions would admit to being party to breaking the CITES Treaty. The only other monogamous employer-hunter relationship I knew of was Mrs. Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh and Lawrence Daley.

I sipped my excellent tea, poured for me by someone I hadn’t noticed.

An irregular chuffing noise started up from von Brutten’s direction. I glanced over to see him holding an embroidered handkerchief to his mouth. His eyes wrinkled at the corners. Was he choking? I nearly got up to administer the Heimlich, but the chuffing stopped and he removed the hanky from his mouth.

Laughing. He’d been laughing at my dumping Daley. I felt bizarrely honored.

“Hmm,” he said, then surprised the hell out of me by saying, “Tell me about your great-uncle.”

“He’s not your business,” I replied.

“He’s ailing, is he not?” Von Brutten’s left hand twisted a gold ring around his right hand’s index finger. “Victim of a pharmaceutical experiment?”

“That’s not—”

“It’s a shame that someone who raised you after your parents died—car accident, wasn’t it?—should now be facing imminent death as well as the loss of everything he owns.”

I stood up, tossed the linen napkin onto the table. “Thanks for the Earl Grey. I’m glad you liked your flowers.” I walked toward the door.

“I know what it’s like to lose all of one’s family,” he called.

He could go screw himself. I kept walking.

“My sources tell me Cradion has a record of concealing its failures no matter the cost.” And when I didn’t stop, he added, “I can repair the damage they did to your uncle.”

I spun. There was no point in shouting How do you know about Cradion? How do you know about Scooter? because of course this was Linus Geraint Newark von Brutten III. I kept my mouth shut and glared at him instead.

He inclined his head toward me. A conciliatory gesture. “But I need your help to do so.”

“Surprise me.”

“Bring me back the Death Orchid and I’ll see your great-uncle has the best chance at living out his full span of years.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s everything it’s rumored to be.” He spread his hands as he said, “It’s the elixir of life.”

He was out of his mind. As nuts as Lawrence Daley and his nutty high-society employer. As nuts as any nutty botanist, taxonomist, or nursery owner who longed for glory in the insulated, isolated, nutty world of rare orchid collecting.

Before I could open my mouth, von Brutten said, “I have proof the orchid exists.”

He snapped his fingers. Sims glided in with a thick padded envelope, laid it on the table, bowed and vanished.

“Please.” Von Brutten’s long fingers gestured to the envelope. “See for yourself.”

I didn’t budge. “What about Cradion? What proof do you have of their wrongdoing?”

“Let me handle Cradion.”

Fair enough. My agenda was pretty narrow. “What will you do for my uncle?”

“I have controlling interest in Lexicran Pharmaceuticals, which directly competes with Cradion. I can…encourage…a particular kind of research.”

“You’re way behind. Cradion’s already in phase two trials. The drug’ll be on the market in no time.”

“My company has been developing a similar treatment for Parkinson’s.”

“Maybe so, but my great-uncle’s problems are a little bigger than that now.”

“A Parkinson’s cure is not the only endeavor my company pursues. Heart medications, like the one that may restore your guardian’s damaged tissues, are also of interest to us. The Death Orchid is the difference between our drug getting FDA approval in two years and Cradion killing off more old people.”

“You just want to see Cradion go down the tubes so your company won’t have any competition. You don’t care about its ethics. Or the Parkinson’s patients.”

Von Brutten’s silver eyes flashed with what might have been humor. “Of course I don’t. I care about the bottom line. So do you. You only want your guardian to survive. You don’t care about the patients who might die because Cradion can pull the wool over the FDA’s eyes.”

“That’s pretty harsh,” I began, but he kept going.

“Stop pretending we’re not the same, Dr. Robards. If you were perfectly honest with yourself, you might find you don’t even care that much about your great-uncle because you’re too busy hating Cradion.”

“Bullshit!” I reached for the doorknob.

He raised his voice. “I can take Cradion down with your help. And save the old man.”

The door handle’s coldness penetrated my palm. I was too much of a pragmatist to obsess over ethics or consequences, but I resented his assumption that my hatred of Cradion overshadowed my love for Scooter. Being successful had made von Brutten arrogant. And offensive. On the other hand, experience had taught me he was also a man of his word, twisted as it was.

He turned my pragmatism against me to get what he wanted: the Death Orchid. And he’d use my bottom line—Scooter’s life—to get it.

Damn.

I let go of the doorknob. “Show me,” I said.

“The Death Orchid is real. I’m told it contains the compounds necessary to create a lifesaving heart medication.”

“Terence Harrison published a paper that refuted claims the Death Orchid exists.”

He inclined his head. “He did so at my request.”

“You mean he lied?”

“I mean he massaged the data so we could continue our work with the plant unmolested by competitors. But that’s old news, Dr. Robards. My researcher ran out of specimens for testing and I need you to bring me another.” His lips quirked. “Or two.”

He opened the envelope and slid its contents onto the table as I walked over to see what he had. It wasn’t much. A blood-streaked, ripped-out page of a spiral notebook. A brass key.

I raised one eyebrow at him.

“Harrison’s last work,” he replied.

“Harrison’s been on sabbatical for a year.”

“I know. He was working for me.”

“What?” My brain struggled. “Harrison isn’t the kind of guy to give up his precious scientific detachment to squander his talents in a commercial effort.”

Von Brutten beamed a pitying look my direction. “If you only knew how many idealistic academics I have on my payroll. Harrison was your mentor, wasn’t he?”

I nodded. “Plant Biology, specializing in taxonomy and biochemistry. And he works for you now?”

“He did, yes.”

“Did?”

“May still do. I’m not sure.”

“Why not?”

“He’s missing.”

A chill shot through my gut. The mild-mannered and anal-retentive Dr. Harrison was physically no match for one of Scooter’s nursing home girlfriends, much less a hired thug. The shock subsided a little in time for anger to take over. Harrison was harmless. They didn’t have to get rough, whoever they were.

I turned the notebook page over, studying the brown stain’s irregular edges sprawled on top of scribbled black ink. The writing beneath was illegible, partly because of the blood and partly because of Harrison’s trademark chicken scratch and the torturous, self-invented shorthand he’d used. Shorthand I’d spent long hours deciphering, keying his lab observations into the best taxonomy and morphology database in the country.

My mind flashed on Harrison’s characteristic fastidiousness, his fondness for bow ties and cheap cologne, his weirdly pale green eyes. Dedicated to the cause. He wouldn’t work for von Brutten unless he had to, no matter what von Brutten had said. I’d sat through too many ad hoc lectures about ethics and the purity of intellectual scientific pursuit to believe otherwise.

But there was that day I’d come back to his office early from lunch and settled down in my cubicle to catch up on some tedious cataloging. Over the high wall that separated my desk from Harrison’s, I heard the door snick shut and him pace quickly to his desk. We worked in silence for a few minutes until I popped up from behind my cube to ask a question. His desk faced mine. Behind it, he stared intently at his computer screen, like a kid lost in a video game. When I spoke, his eyes snapped to mine and his face flushed. Caught. I couldn’t understand what he said to me then, he was stuttering so badly. It’d taken most of the day for his hands to stop shaking and his face to resume its normal pallor.

I’d never cared to know what he was looking at and I still didn’t. All I knew was that beneath the hard core scientist lurked something weak, maybe even shameful. But hell, we all had our weaknesses, our frailties. What had happened to make Harrison sell out his principles, to work for someone like von Brutten? To possibly get him killed? The anger took on an edge of sadness as I ran a finger over the stain’s edge.

“Harrison’s blood, perhaps,” von Brutten offered.

“And he’s missing.” I swallowed. “Or do you really mean dead?”

“Kidnapped is another option.”

Great. I was not Nancy Drew. “Right,” I said, “and he could have nicked himself with a penknife, thought, ‘to hell with it,’ and is now stretched out in a hammock in Belize. I can’t find him based on this information.”

Von Brutten pressed his silk hanky to his upper lip. “Dr. Harrison’s whereabouts don’t interest me, Dr. Robards. I want you to find another Death Orchid.”

“You want me to find a phantom orchid at the possible expense of my life, Mr. von Brutten. I know you play your cards close to the vest but I need you to flash me an ace here.” His mild eyes flickered when I looked at him hard and asked, “Is Harrison dead?”

“I honestly don’t know. He hasn’t reported in, and this is what was brought to me when I made inquiries.”

It wasn’t brain surgery to figure out the henchmen von Brutten had sent hadn’t found either Harrison or Harrison’s corpse. “Is this the best your goons could do?” I waved the page. “Where’s the rest? And what’s it from?”

“It’s from the project notebook he used during new lab tests. He was double-checking his initial results before heading into the field to obtain another Death Orchid. My associates didn’t find the notebook.”

So whoever did something, whatever it was, with Harrison probably had the bulk of the research. I struggled with the image of Harrison frumping around the forest, red bow tie and green cardigan, a trowel in one hand and bug spray in the other. As far as I knew, the closest he’d ever gotten to a jungle was a springtime stroll through Edgerton Park.

“Where is ‘the field’?” I demanded. “South America? Africa? The Pacific Rim?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s crap. If the Death Orchid was so important to you, you’d know where it could be found.”

“Dr. Harrison disappeared before he could convey that information to me. He was working in San Antonio.” Von Brutten picked up the brass key and dangled it from his elegant thumb and forefinger like a gift. Or bait. “His lab.”

“Will whoever jumped him be waiting for me when I get there?”

Von Brutten’s shoulders lifted a quarter of an inch, then dropped. A shrug, I interpreted.

“For a guy who knows everything, you don’t know much,” I informed him. “You know what happened to him, and you know whether I’ll be next if I use this key.”

The smile that briefly tipped up the corners of his lips chilled my blood. “You won’t be next. After all, I’m counting on you to bring back my orchid.”

His orchid. Right. Keep your priorities straight, girl. This ain’t ’bout nothin’ but the flower. Remembering that might keep me alive.

“You do know Thurston-Fitzhugh knows you’re after it,” I said.

Von Brutten’s sculpted eyebrows rose slightly. “A leak.” The brief flash of steel in his eyes said heads would roll within the hour. “There is a detail of which you should be aware,” he added.

I didn’t like it already. “What’s that?”

“My lab will require a week to produce the serum that will save your great-uncle.”

Fear clutched my stomach, choked my lungs. “And my great-uncle will last a month at the outside. So you’re telling me I have a little over two weeks to figure out what Harrison knew, get to wherever he was headed, find the orchid and then get back?”

Von Brutten shrugged. “Sixteen days, technically, if you leave today. And if the old man hangs on.”

Shit.

There was no way. Finding a plant you’d never seen took months, not days. But I had to try.

“You have copies of these things?” I asked as I shoved the evidence back in its envelope.

His smile suggested I was terribly naive. “Have a good trip, Dr. Robards. Keep me informed. I’ll have the lab on standby, awaiting your return.”

I leveled a look at him meant to tell him bad things would happen if he didn’t honor that promise. His own expression was mild, vaguely fatherly, the look of a man who had nothing to lose.

And because I had everything to lose, I grabbed the envelope and left.

Not one to walk into trouble blind, I decided to call in a couple of favors before heading to Harrison’s lab. In a previous life, I’d done a little contract work for the CIA, helping them with the Danube violet poison case. Nearly getting killed then would come in handy now: this particular science office owed me some serious favors. I planned to get the straight story on Cradion Pharmaceutical and my missing graduate advisor. If anybody could dig up the real dirt, it was these guys. After a short conversation with the Man In Charge about some pharmaceutical industry snooping, I took the elevator to the basement to find Marcus Donovan.

Marcus’s wizardry with all things clinical had broken the Danube case open wide and made him the leading expert on plant-based poisons. Before the CIA wags could start speculating on my joining their little hazplant team and before Marcus could start speculating on whether I’d move in with him, I’d bailed. As far as I was concerned, getting involved with anything for the long haul was bad news. This time I needed to keep things between me and Marcus professional.

I had to remind myself of that as I leaned in his lab’s doorway, watching him do his secret agent thing. Tall, he had to lean way over to look through his microscope, spilling locks of long, black hair over his forehead. His broad, white-coated shoulders made him look more like a sanitarium orderly than a scientist. His movements were large but precise. The impression I got was of a pro running back repairing an antique watch.

He must have sensed my presence because he said, “Not you again,” without looking up.

I waved the plastic envelope von Brutten had given me, Harrison’s bloodstained page safely sealed inside, and pushed off from the doorjamb.

The lab was stainless steel, glass, and bitterly cold. I wished I’d brought a sweater. Maybe it was why Marcus and his crew were confined to the CIA’s basement, leaving the innocuous, stucco-fronted HQ upstairs looking more like the San Antonio Visitors Bureau than the software company it purported to be.

“How’d you get in here?” He removed the slide from the microscope and filed it carefully in sequence on a tray.

“Everybody in this office owes me for the Danube incident.”

Marcus looked up finally, meeting my gaze. “I think I’ve already paid my dues.”

My face went hot. “You’re right,” I admitted.

“You could at least have left a note on my pillow.” His keen blue eyes sharpened. “A Dear John works better for me than a vanishing act.”

I nodded. I needed to apologize—for leaving without saying goodbye, for being scared, for hopping in the sack with him in the first place—but the words stuck somewhere around the base of my throat. Dear Marcus, I’m sorry I’m a selfish bitch. I’m sorry I left after one night and never looked back.

He nodded, apparently accepting the words I didn’t say. A deep breath later, he relaxed into his old teasing ways. I was forgiven. “What’d you do to your hair?”

I shrugged, felt the ponytail just brush my shoulder. “I needed a change.”

“You see the boss?”

“I did indeed. He wished me well.”

“He wished you to hell, you mean.”

“Yeah, but only after I’ve got what I came for. He’s checking into a pharmaceutical company for me.”

“A pharma?”

“It’s personal.”

He nodded, taking that in and leaving it alone. “I thought you’d moved far, far away,” Marcus said, rounding the gleaming worktable and smiling a little as he did it.

He was still a hunk, but I wasn’t here to resurrect ghosts. “I did. Now I’m back.”

“For how long?” He crossed one muscular arm over the other, prompting a nice burn of remembrance in my sweet spot.

“Long enough for you to tell me what this is.” I handed him the plastic envelope.

He took it, glanced at the page. “It’s a new excuse for not having your homework.”

“I’m serious.”

When Marcus smiled, that dimple quirked in his cheek.

“I’m really serious,” I said firmly, trying to ignore the dimple. “This is evidence and I need to read what’s under the blood.”

He exhaled loudly for my benefit. “All right.” He pulled the page out of its protective plastic to examine it. “I don’t see how you can read this scribble even if I can clean it up.” He frowned. “But it’s not blood. It’s something else.”

“What?”

“I’ll have to get back to you.”

“I’m short on time,” I said. “Can you at least make the writing visible?”

“Wait here.” He went through a side door that had a red bulb over the doorway, like a photography dark room.

While I waited, I took out Harrison’s brass key. Under the harsh lab lighting, the key looked crisp around the edges, like it’d been superimposed on my vision. I evaluated what I knew at this point. Harrison had set up a research lab in San Antonio and worked on some kind of miracle cure for von Brutten. Whoever had kidnapped or killed Harrison had probably already been to his lab since von Brutten’s henchmen had come up with nothing more useful than the stained page Marcus was working on. If the bad guys had taken Harrison’s project notebook, that meant they had some idea of what they were looking for. But as far as I knew, there weren’t that many assassin botanists running around, so I stood a chance of finding something the bad guys wouldn’t think important. Otherwise, I’d have to widen my search to Harrison’s house.

The dark room door opened and Marcus came back with what looked like a Photostat on clear film. It was.

“Here’s the page sans blood as best I can get it for now. If you want to know what the blood actually is, that’ll take a little time.” He leaned his hip against the lab table and smiled charmingly at me. “Can I call you?”

“Better leave me a voice mail,” I said, handing him my card. “I’m in a hurry.”

I froze, my hands in Harrison’s drawers.

Down the town house’s single flight of stairs, low voices burbled. Men’s voices. Two of them. Steps creaked as the men climbed up. Fortunately, I’d pushed the upstairs bedroom door nearly shut before starting my little rampage through my old mentor’s underwear.

My luck never runs good for long. They must be cops. Had someone seen me breaking and entering an expensive condo in broad daylight?

The men passed up the bedroom and went directly into the home office across the hall, like they knew where they were going. Shuffling, papers flipping, footsteps. They weren’t cops. Harrison’s latest graduate students, maybe? Did they work in his lab? Something glass shattered on a hard surface and one of the men cursed.

“Shut up!” the other hissed.

“Why? Nobody’s home.” A pause. “It stinks in here.”

“So?”

“It’s gross.”

“Keep your voice down. Leave that alone and help me look through these binders. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

I straightened. Funny how fear evaporates when I know the other guy is just as much in the wrong as I am. It kind of levels the moral playing field. Gives a girl back her spunk.

The Dr. Terence Jasper Harrison I knew was a Grade-A neatnik. A place for everything and everything in its place. His office could have been the poster child for anal, scientific academia. He didn’t go out looking for plants; plants came to him to be studied to death.

One look at Harrison’s lab on San Antonio’s north side an hour ago had told me he’d either gone off his meds or the bad guys had beaten me there. After scrounging around the broken glass, strewn papers and emptied specimen cabinets, I’d gotten out before the cops could show up and pin the damage on me.

Next stop: his downtown two-story condo, where I now knelt, up to my elbows in socks carefully bundled into color-coded piles, except for a mateless stray exiled to the bottom right corner.

The second-floor home office now being ransacked by the jokers had yielded nothing for me but a bunch of old notebooks, an array of dried specimens, a few bottles of herbs in preservative alcohol, and one very nasty dead mouse behind the bookcase. Dr. Harrison had been out for some time. Nothing even remotely resembling a clue had been left behind.

That was my advantage in having been his graduate assistant. I knew he may have kept his technical notes in his office, but he always kept a memento of his current big find close to home. Kind of like a souvenir. Or a security blanket. Or a good-luck charm.

Hence the sock drawer. Alas, nothing but socks. I took another look around.

Harrison’s full-size bed sported a manly plaid bedspread undimpled by hands or head. The plain oak nightstand was held down by two neat stacks of books, biology texts in one and true crimes in the other. The oak dresser sat forlornly against the near wall, its surface empty except for a lone comb, a homemade ashtray and a fine layer of dust.

I flipped silently through the books on the nightstand. Nothing. The nightstand didn’t have a drawer. The stray sock’s mate lay limp under the bed. I felt between the mattresses but came up with nothing. I picked up the heavy wooden ashtray, hoping for a key underneath. Nada.

I was about to put the ashtray back when its design caught my eye. The pattern under the varnish gleamed pearlescent black on matte black, almost like raku. Had they smoked the wood somehow to make it look like that? I looked closer. The ashtray was homemade all right, but not by Harrison’s niece in art class. The inside bottom bore a miniature stylized jaguar pawprint.

Last time I saw something like that was in an ethnobotany presentation on how particular plants and herbs had been used for hundreds of years by shamans. Into the bowl goes crushed leaves and monkey spit, out comes a medicine to cure earache. The bowl itself was blessed by the shaman. A blessed bowl imbued the plant matter ground in it with magical powers.

Harrison wasn’t the type of guy to keep knickknacks around, not even precious mementos from past projects. Hell, there was barely anything in the condo that didn’t look like standard hotel fare. And Harrison didn’t smoke.

The bowl’s presence suggested two things: First, Harrison really had been in the field to collect the Death Orchid and brought this little talisman back recently, as a souvenir. Second, if I could find out where the bowl came from, I could figure out where Harrison had found the orchid.

The bowl fit in my shoulder bag. Now to wait until the jokers left.

“We could get Noah to go after the orchid, you know,” one said to the other. It sounded like he was standing in the office doorway.

“I don’t want to pay him if I don’t have to.”

“Well, no, but why should we have to contract malaria when we can hire someone else to do it?”

Indeed. I’d often asked myself the same question. My answer was always that I knew my job better than anyone else. These clowns might be after the Death Orchid, but they were probably armchair botanists. Sort of like Harrison without the single-minded pursuit of taxonomic perfection. This Noah guy might be another collector for hire, like me or Lawrence Daley. Heck, these guys might even be locals working for Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh, trying to track down the Death Orchid for her.

As it was, Noah was a nice alias. Most of us used stage names to hide our identities from Fish and Wildlife and Customs. I’d already had six last names in the past three years, with passports to match. “Robards” was my favorite so far. I’d hate giving it up in a few months.

Then there was a crash and thunk, like they’d pulled the desk apart. Scrabbling. A creak. Nails being ripped from boards.

“Wait, I’ve got it!” the one inside the office said.

“This isn’t a map—”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Silence for a long moment. Annoyance flared in my chest. It was unfair. So I’m not Nancy Drew. I got here first. I just don’t bust up the furniture to find the loot.

“What are all the numbers?” the whiner asked.

“He wrote everything in code. I’ll get one of his students to translate it. Let’s go.”

“So we don’t need Noah?” the whiner asked as they passed the bedroom on their way out.

“Not if this turns out to be a map.”

I waited until they closed the front door to slip downstairs after them. They headed off the condo’s grounds and further into town, toward the River Walk. I followed, playing native San Antonian out for an early evening stroll.

The one I assumed was the Whiner was a thin little guy about my height sporting a bad haircut and a limp. The other one, the Brain of the outfit, needed to take an iron to his Dockers and was losing his hair in back. He was kind of cute if a girl could ignore the haughty look he threw at her as he shrugged on his light windbreaker. Jerk.

They crossed the Crockett Street Bridge and dropped down to the River Walk below, where the trees, flowering shrubs and flowing green water lowered the temperature several degrees. I hadn’t been on the Paseo del Rio since the Danube case three years ago, but a glance at a walk map refreshed my memory. The restaurants and shops might have changed hands, but the river itself was still the same.

Fair enough. The dinner crowd was just picking up. Bumping into the Brain and the Whiner would be a cinch.

I eased down the stone steps to the Paseo del Rio, letting them get a little ahead so I could judge their purpose without being spotted. It seemed weird that they would have lifted the map leading to the Death Orchid and then just meandered down the River Walk for an evening meal. Where was their sense of professional urgency? Maybe I was feeling enough urgency—because of Scooter—for all three of us.

They stopped at a pink oleander-shaded menu stand and stood with their hands in their pockets, browsing. A gang of teenagers migrated past, jostling the Brain, who glanced up in annoyance. Then his attention went back to the menu.

Better to approach them one at a time. The Brain walked on. The Whiner lingered over the appetizers. I strode forward, turned my head to look at Boudro’s Texas Bistro, and gave the Whiner a full-frontal press.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I spewed, smiling my sweetest smile as I pawed his trousers as though trying to cop a feel while maneuvering my shoulder bag. Nothing in his pockets. The map had to be on the Brain.

“That’s all right.” The poor guy looked almost grateful to have been groped.

Then the Brain turned to look for his buddy and stared me in the face. His eyes widened. He clearly recognized me from somewhere, but I had no idea where. His face—innocuous, bland, shocked—meant nothing to me. In a split second, he pivoted and sprinted away, one hand reaching for his left windbreaker pocket.

Eureka.

“Hey! Wait!” the Whiner yelled behind us.

The Brain didn’t slow. He dodged through the walking crowd alongside the river like a freshman running back. I got hung up around a waiter carrying a tray of steaming seafood, slid underneath his arm, and took off again. The Brain’s distinctive bobbing head kept me posted amid the sun visors, suits and golf shirts.

He abruptly turned up a steep stone staircase to Commerce Street. I took the steps two at a time, jostling a bevy of well-dressed tourists and earning a chorus of “Hey!” A guy wearing a navy sports jacket and a power tie with green accents—not a good combo—grabbed my arm but I twisted free. The interference slowed me down enough to let the Brain make the street without me and lose himself in the shopping crowd spilling onto the sidewalk.

Damn.

I jogged further south, thinking he wouldn’t be so stupid as to double back to pick up the Whiner. At the Market and Alamo intersection, I came upon another set of steps leading down to the River Walk. From the Market Street bridge, I could see a good bit of the river and the people walking along both sides of it. On the north side, not much happening except for a maintenance barge puttering south and a bright pink river barge loading up with dinner passengers. On the south side, the terraced Arneson River Theater seats had filled up with spectators for whatever was going on onstage across the river, which was loud salsa….

Bingo.

Thinning hair, beige windbreaker, and a furtive look over one shoulder. Had he not looked, I’d have had to think twice. I swung down the stairs, jumping the rail on the last five steps to land next to a startled restaurant hostess with flaming red hair and a Clinique-ly perfect face.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

I was nearly on him when the Brain caught sight of me and bolted toward the stage. On it, several brilliantly costumed Mexican dancers wheeled in some traditional hoedown. Mariachis jammed on a little platform behind the dancers. Across the river, spectators sprawled on the terraced seats leading up a steep hillside. A tourist barge moseyed in our direction, the driver giving the usual historical spiel as he steered his boat between the stage and the seating area.

Perfect place for a takedown.

The Brain jumped a barricade blocking off any pedestrians who might wander onto the stage and caught his trailing foot on the wood. He nearly fell, taking the barricade with him. Great. He was tiring. I sprinted over the downed barricade. He catapulted onto the stage. The crowd gasped. I jumped up after him. Dancers scattered like gorgeous tropical birds spooked by a cat. A running leap and I tackled him, shoving him down face first onto the wooden flooring.

“Gotcha!” I shouted over the mariachis. The Brain wriggled like a worm on a hook. “Hold still a minute, will ya?” I reached for his map pocket.

I caught a glimpse of dark green uniform in my peripheral vision as the Brain wrenched himself loose, throwing a much lighter me to one side. I scrambled to my feet. Dark green uniform meant the Parks and Wildlife cops. The dancers faded back when I lit out after the Brain again, chasing him up the walk toward Presa Street.

The Brain threw a frightened glance back at me and then did something I’ll never forget: he jumped from the sidewalk onto the oncoming river barge, skidded behind the driver, hopped from there onto a maintenance scow headed the other direction, and then finished with a mad leap to the other sidewalk. A second later and the boats had passed each other, leaving me looking at twelve feet of water between us.

Nice trick. And there wasn’t a footpath close enough to cut him off. I watched him scramble up a retaining wall. He disappeared.

The dark green uniforms pounded my way, so I took a page from the Brain’s book and skedaddled up an ivy-covered wall. On the other side, I sprinted over Market Street to the River Bend parking garage and my first floor Rent-A-Wreck. Thirty seconds later I motored sedately out into evening traffic.

Only after I knew I wasn’t being followed did I pull over so I could study the paper the Brain had so graciously given up, unbeknownst to him, in our scuffle amid the gorgeous dancers.

Harrison’s proprietary code covered the page. I scanned through the gibberish, finding nothing but lots of notes to self about insects, repellants and allergies. The poor Brain had got himself bamboozled. Then a set of letters and numbers caught my attention. I translated, tried not to get too excited.

Oh, yes, Harrison had been in the field. That little encoded phrase at the bottom of the sheet told me exactly where he’d been.

Roraima, Brazil, here I come.

Chapter 3

The Hotel Imperial in Boa Vista crouched at the city’s edge, its clapboard sides weathered and unpainted for most of a decade. Chico, the Brazilian contact I’d inherited from Daley when he got dumped from von Brutten’s payroll, had set up both my flight from Boa Vista into the jungle and my guide. He’d also booked the Imperial for me. Doing me a favor, he probably thought. I could tell it was usually a brothel but, for the sake of the International Conference on Environmental Protection and Sustainable Living being held that week, it had temporarily become a true hotel. Just grungy, sleazy and cheap.

Thanks for nothin’, Chico.

The conference was being held in one of the legitimate hotels in the city’s heart. Strange city to have a conference, I thought as I collected the old-fashioned church key to my no doubt dingy and bug-ridden room. Why not Manaus, which at least had a cosmopolitan air? The greasy hotel landlord smiled a greasy smile and wished me a good stay. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what he said; my Portuguese isn’t what it should be.

As I trudged up the narrow stairs, I heaved my canvas duffel bag over one shoulder. The pain about doing what I do isn’t the scraping around in the jungle. It’s having to buy all your supplies at the local open-air market—rice, beans, a cooking pot, matches, mosquito netting, a hammock, tins of cooked meat, bottled water (which is incredibly heavy after you’ve carried it around for a while), and rum or whiskey for trading with the Indians. Bickering prices with wily natives whose language I imperfectly speak and hear is no fun. I walk away suspecting I’ve been robbed.

I usually bring with me the real basics: my day pack, two sixty-meter climbing ropes and assorted climbing hardware, a collection of Hefty OneZip bags in various sizes, a first-aid kit complete with snakebite antivenin and antimalarial prophylactic, several cans of mosquito repellant, three changes of cotton underwear, tincture of iodine, tampons and garlic. I know. Garlic. But I swear, the jungle grows fungus better than any place on earth with the possible exception of a woman’s vagina. One clove used as a suppository can kill the beginnings of a yeast infection. Cross my heart. Garlic is a natural antibiotic.

Life in the jungle doesn’t get really hairy until about the second or third day. You count on being able to wash out your undies in a stream at least once a day; when you can’t, you turn them inside out or go grungy until you can find a stream. When the bottled water runs out, you boil enough local water to fill a canteen, doctor it with the iodine and hope for the best. You try not to get bitten by snakes, and Brazil has plenty. You also learn real fast how to tie mosquito netting around your hammock so the little bastards don’t eat you alive in the night. The mosquito netting also keeps the vampire bats off you. And no, the garlic won’t help in that situation.

Normally all this stuff would get carried around by lackeys I’d hired. But Daley decided this time last year his best bet to finding good plants was to track me rather than the plants. Besides, an orchid stolen from me wouldn’t make it into von Brutten’s hands. During his first attempt, I’d had two “interns,” a gun-toting guide and a burly carrier for the heavy stuff. As a result of having too many people to worry about when Daley and his little band of Merry Men struck, I nearly let him make off with a delicious Phragmipedium. Never again, I vowed, and have traveled with only a guide since.

I humped all my stuff down the long, dark corridor to my room. The church key went into the heavy stained-door’s lock and turned. The lock clicked and thunked. I shoved. The door creaked but didn’t budge. Brilliant. The damn door was stuck in its frame.

I dropped my stuff on the dirty floor and backed across the corridor—a whole step. Not much room to build up a head of steam. And in my colorful cotton turista dress disguise, I couldn’t just pound the door down without getting the neighbors’ attention. I certainly didn’t want that in case Daley managed to track me this far, which he was probably working on. So I set my back against the corridor and put the heel of my flat sandal near the rickety handle. I gave a quick, sharp, satisfying kick.

The door exploded open. It swung hard and bounced off a wooden chest placed too close to the doorway. Inside, the room echoed the same gloom as the corridor. I stepped in to review the scene. Rickety iron bed, cracked mirror, dirty walls, light eeking from a bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling. Hotel California it ain’t.

“I beg your pardon.”

I spun. Behind the partially open door and battered bureau sat an iron claw-footed tub filled with soapy water and a handsome man. Dark hair, dark eyes, lightly flared nose, a flurry of black hair on his well-muscled chest.

“I told the manager I wasn’t interested in any entertainment,” he said in what I suspected was perfect Portuguese. He looked me up and down, pausing in interesting places. “But you may have changed my mind.”

He stood, revealing the most splendid specimen I’d ever seen either in the hothouse or in the field. Water glistened over his dark skin, accentuating every angular muscle and darkening the dense thatch beneath his navel. An admirable addition to any garden, I thought. He reached for a towel and casually dried his back, still standing knee-deep in water and letting me enjoy the view.

Part of my brain scrambled for the proper phraseology for I’m not a whore, you chauvinistic ass, while another part searched for, Take me now and be quick about it. The sane part—the very small part with the synapses still firing—screamed to get out of there.

I struggled with my Portuguese. “You must have the wrong room.”

“Inglês?”

“Yes.”

He continued to study me while he lifted one powerful leg from the tub, then the other. Even the undersides of his thighs were dark. The towel made another circuit of his broad shoulders and traveled down his chest, but not far enough to obstruct my line of sight. The scientist in me took over, pondering dimensions, speed, staying power.

“I rather think you have the wrong room.” His English was as perfect as his Portuguese. And his deep voice stung right where a girl needs it most. “Too bad.”

I managed not to stutter. “I was told this room.”

“Then maybe that’s correct.” He looked pointedly at the laughable excuse for a double bed provided by the establishment. “Do you hog the covers?”

“On that thing I wouldn’t have to.”

“It is narrow.” His gaze lingered on the open neckline of my dress.

I resisted the urge to tuck my arms in and artificially produce more cleavage than I legitimately have.

“I’ll straighten this out with the manager,” he said.

He dressed as leisurely as he toweled. First he pulled on a pair of cotton trousers. I guessed underwear wasn’t his thing. He shrugged into a loose shirt, then buttoned it from the bottom up, leaving me a nice swath of bulging chest to admire for as long as possible.

Evil man.

I followed his broad shoulders downstairs where he engaged in a lively debate with the greasy landlord in speed Portuguese, most of which I didn’t catch. When they were done, the landlord smiled apologetically.

“What just happened?” I asked.

“The international conference has every room in this place taken. We will have to share.”

“Then we should each get half our money back.” It was miserly of me—half would be all of eight dollars—but it was the principle of the thing. I didn’t appreciate being taken advantage of.

“He’s agreed to have dinner sent up.” He steered me back toward the stairs.

“Sent up? We’re not honeymooning.” I mentally cursed as slightly pornographic images starring my handsome roommate naturally coursed through my head.

His deep laugh sent a thrill down my spine. “Perhaps not, but I believe we may be together for some time.”

“What do you mean?” I stopped on the landing, leaving him a couple of steps behind and still at eye level. Nice and tall.

“Our generous landlord told me your name. Dr. Robards?”

“Yes,” I admitted warily, reluctant to give up even my stage name to this guy.

“I am Carlos Gutierrez, your pilot. Chico hired me to take you into the jungle.” He smiled, and his black eyes glinted many, many promises at me.

Thank you, Chico.

I slid out of bed well before dawn and silently dressed. Force of habit. I always check all my gear before heading out. At first light Carlos and I would be at the airstrip, taking off for the deep interior. I twisted the bare bulb in its socket to turn it on, then pulled out the number-coded paper I’d lifted from the Brain in San Antonio, memorized it and burned it in a metal ashtray. When the ashes cooled, I broke them up with a ballpoint pen.

Despite the crackling and the smoke, Carlos still slept soundly, as well he should after the heroically athletic sex he’d treated me to. He lay with one strong arm thrown over his bare stomach and the other tucked under my pillow.

I tipped the ashes into the waste can on top of the used condoms. Story of my sex life, I thought, looking into the can. I always get hot for somebody and go into it thinking, The sex is going to be great so maybe this guy is The Guy, and the next day have a helluva casual sex hangover. Maybe it was time to stop making this mistake. The ashes cast up a question mark of smoke. I went to check my gear.

All the essentials went into my day pack, and everything else would go into the canvas duffel bag, leaving me plenty of room for the orchids. Ordinarily I’d bring a newspaper with me for drying and pressing specimens. But von Brutten needed the Death Orchid alive, so I’d brought several cardboard tubes for storing and shipping. He’d also given me a handful of forged CITES certificates to help me get the orchid back into the States. I’d have to pass off the Death Orchid, if I found it, as a different orchid altogether.

That’s another irony of CITES. You can’t transport a specimen across international boundaries unless it can be identified as a known species. So if you’re like me, hunting down brand-new species, you’re outta luck. Or else you become a criminal, as I have. What a woman will do in the name of botany.

I settled in the chair and by the dim light took another look at Harrison’s notebook page Photostat. Marcus would probably figure out pretty fast what the blood on the original page really was, but my guess was I’d be in the jungle by then, out of reach of anything remotely resembling phone service. I’d just have to check messages next time I hit a city. Most of Harrison’s handwriting, shorthand and abbreviations I could decipher from three years’ practice working as his graduate lab assistant. The page took issue with Rudall’s suggestion of a close morphological relationship between Hypoxidaceae and Orchidaceae. Hypoxidaceae are bulb plants, like lilies and amaryllis. Put simply, in order for a plant to be chemically active, it needed, among other things, to have alkaloids, and Hypoxidaceae don’t. If orchids were like lilies, in other words, they’d be useless for any pharmaceutical company to pursue.

Harrison’s notes, calculations and research were all designed to determine whether his Death Orchid specimen could indeed be used by a pharmaceutical company. In layman’s terms, the answer was a whopping great yes.

A scribble near the margin, barely readable and in shorthand, caught my eye. Something about the orchid’s distinctively long column. That probably meant its pollinator, whatever it was, had a distinctively long proboscis. Rain forest relationships are ancient. Sometimes, more often than you might think, a single insect and a single plant have coevolved so that one can’t exist without the other. The bug drinks only the nectar provided by the plant and the plant can accept as pollinator only that bug. Or, like Scooter’s Phalaenopsis, the flower disguises itself as the bug’s mate so the males will be attracted to it. Darwin himself, after finding an orchid with a twelve-inch column, had hypothesized the existence of an insect with a twelve-inch proboscis. Turns out, years after Darwin’s death, someone found that very insect.

But the idea of saying “Open wide” and shoving a microscopic tongue depressor down a bug’s throat didn’t appeal to me.

Then another scribble: the Death Moth.

“Up already?” Carlos’s carelessly deep voice should have raised a shiver, but it merely annoyed me. I liked to work alone, in silence.

“Getting ready to go,” I replied, shoving the Photostat into my day pack.

“Where are we going today?” he asked.

I dug the medicine bowl out of my day pack and handed it to him. “I need to go where this was found.”

“Yanomamo,” he murmured. His forefinger traced the jaguar pawprint idly.

“And that narrows down my search to what? A million square kilometers of rain forest?”

Carlos grinned. “No, gatinha. I can take you to someone who can tell you exactly where this came from. A scientist.”

“Chico said you knew the area.”

“I do,” he said, flashing a charming smile that fell strangely flat. “I know every airstrip in the northern Amazon.”

Great. Now I’d have to risk exposing my mission to someone who just might deduce what I was after. Someone who might give Lawrence Daley the same information. This trip was getting more difficult all the time.

An hour later we piled out of a battered taxi and strode through a scattering mist toward the airstrip. A beat-up Cessna Caravan 675 squatted behind a sheet metal shed. At least the plane looked relatively new. Riding in it couldn’t be any worse than riding ten miles in a shockless Chevy over the pocked and jutted road to the airstrip. The runway, predictably, was a ribbon shaved out of the jungle, bounded by ever-encroaching forest currently being beaten back by a small army of machete-wielding Indians.

When we approached the shed, its crooked wooden door shoved open and a smallish Brazilian stepped out to yell at Carlos. Carlos started shouting back with equal verve in what I gathered was some kind of bargaining behavior.

Then a fresh-faced, good-looking young white guy bounded out of the shed, carrying a backpack, a tripod and a camera case.

“Oh no,” I said to Carlos, interrupting his shouting match and thumbing at the college boy as he joined us. “He’s not sharing my plane.”

College Boy pushed his wire frames higher on his nose and held his hand out to Carlos. After a shake, he launched into a spate of excellent Portuguese that, judging from Carlos’s raised eyebrows, surprised the pilot as much as it did me. The Brazilian stood back and grinned. Then College Boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills that could choke a horse.

“We had a deal,” I reminded Carlos. “You. Me. The plane. No one else.”

“Excuse me,” College Boy said in English, turning to me.

“What.”

His smile didn’t falter. “I’m Dr. Richard Kinkaid. I’m headed out to Ixpachia Research Station.” He shoved his glasses further onto his nose. “I’m an entomologist,” he added, as though that would somehow make a difference.

I looked him up and down. Right. A bug nerd. A Milquetoast bug hunter with an oversize camera and no idea how to take care of himself outside a graduate school laboratory. I read the tea leaves and didn’t like what I saw.

“No,” I said to him. “You may not share my plane.”

“If the pilot’s willing to take me, it’s not your concern.”

“And I won’t take you to your research station, even if I knew where it was.”

“I have a map—”

“And I won’t pull your ass out of the jungle when you get burned by fire liana.”

“Fire liana?”

“Or stung by Dresk’s beetles.”

“I have an antidote for that—”

“Or get a limb chewed off by a hungry jaguar.”

“Jaguars don’t—”

“Or get shot with a poisoned arrow by one of the several hostile indigenous peoples.”

At that his strong face solidified to stone. Arrogant jungle newbie on his first field trip. His presence was an unacceptable risk. We glared at each other.

“Not interested,” I clarified.

“But I am,” Carlos cut in. “Ixpachia Research Station is where we are going. However, my rates are rather steep.”

The bug nerd turned his back on me to juggle his tripod under one arm as he counted out bills. Carlos’s eyes widened.

“Hey,” I said to Carlos, grabbing his sleeve to take his attention off the cash. “I paid for your exclusive services.”

“You got those last night,” he said with an intimate leer.

My face heated up. “I paid you good money for a solitary trip. A flight in, five days working in the jungle, a flight out. I’m not sharing my plane.”

“But his money’s as good as yours.” Carlos’s perfect white smile would have dazzled me yesterday. Today it just made me mad. “And the flight is dangerous, is it not? Should I not be paid for the work as much as I can get?”

“We had a deal.”

He chuckled. “Gatinha, my word is true, but money is life.” He waved at the bug nerd. “Bring your gear, amigo!”

The Brazilian cackled as I stumped along behind Carlos and the bug nerd, fuming. I’d have a word with Chico next time I saw him. For now, I’d deal with it. But I didn’t have time to baby-sit anybody. Scooter was my priority. Everybody else would just have to get by.

Carlos jerked the Cessna’s cargo door open for us. A whoosh of stifling hot air fell out. The plane was just this side of a stripped-down drug runner: a pilot’s seat, electronics and little else. Even the passenger seats were gone. Good old Carlos must have a day job flying snow. Maybe dodging the joint Brazilian-American drug-enforcement guys had made him arrogant with the average sightseer. He was used to flying much richer cargo than what I’d bring back.

“Let me get that for you.” The bug nerd reached for my duffel bag.

Hell, why not let him play gentleman and throw out his back? Maybe I’d make this trip alone after all. But he easily swung the heavy duffel bag into the cargo bay with one arm. Then he hopped into the plane after it, holding out his broad hand for my day pack and smiling at me like this was a Boy Scout jaunt to Camp Okefenokee.

“I got it.” I kept my day pack and climbed into the plane. I settled down across from the open cargo door and hoped he wouldn’t start talking.

Up front, Carlos flicked switches and turned dials. A few minutes later, the Cessna’s single engine fired up. The bare metal wall I leaned against vibrated from my neck all the way to my butt. Even my ankles tingled from the jarring.

The bug nerd shoved his gear against one of the plane’s exposed steel ribs and scrambled up to the cockpit.

“The engine doesn’t sound right to me,” he shouted over the guttering noise.

Carlos shook his head. “This plane is safe, my friend. Go take a nap.”

“But the mechanical clatter—”

“It’s nothing!”

The nerd’s firm jaw tightened, then he yelled, “So where are the parachutes?”

Carlos flashed the nerd a dark look and jerked his head toward the cargo bay. Get out of my face. I could read the message from halfway down the plane. Carlos might be a good guy as far as illicit dealings in the jungle go—meaning he wouldn’t kill anyone without a good reason—but, like me, he was a mercenary who needed to eat. Mouthy pip-squeak “experts” got tossed out the cargo door at seven thousand feet.

Besides, the bug nerd had given him the full payment up front. Dumbass.

The nerd flopped down again across from me, mindless of the open cargo door to his left. He closed his eyes, apparently taking Carlos’s nap suggestion seriously. He wore pristine trekking gear that looked like it’d been ordered out of a Whole Earth Catalog: heavy canvas pants, a shirt a size too big for him, what had to be day-hiking boots made by Birkenstock. His dark brown hair lay longish on his collar, highlighting prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw and chiseled lips. I wondered briefly what he’d look like with a ponytail but decided “tasty” wasn’t a word a woman like me should use. The wire frames slipped a half inch down his nose. He didn’t move.

I turned my attention to the shed. The Brazilian who apparently acted as the local air-traffic controller was nowhere to be seen. Nothing out there but trees and bugs and already-intense heat.

The plane lurched forward. The Cessna stuttered and jerked toward the dirt runway. Deep jungle green rolled by. Workers’ arms rose and fell, blades slashing and hacking. Carlos turned the plane’s nose due west and the shed came into view again. A very dark man, maybe half Negro, half Indian, stood beside the shed, staring at us. Carlos stopped the plane to check something.

The staring man strode toward us purposefully, his gaze unwavering. A chill shot through my veins. Carlos fidgeted with controls, and still the man walked, unhurried and deliberate. How could someone stare so long without blinking?

Then the man grasped the open cargo doorway and leaned in. Twin puckered scars etched his face, neck, and the part of his collarbone I could see beneath his ragged shirt. Around his neck, a leather cord held a single jaguar tooth—a canine. His huge hands gripped the doorway with such strength I had no doubt he could bend the metal if he chose. Black eyes stared at me.

Directly at me.

The chill in my veins dropped to a freeze. He didn’t glare; his eyes were as emotionless as those of the jaguar he’d killed for its tooth.

Endless darkness welled up in my periphery. The plane’s metallic clatter heightened into deafening howls and screams and roars. The world dropped away from my feet, leaving me standing in utter blackness, alone. I no longer hunkered down in a Cessna waiting to go into the jungle. The jungle had come for me, and what hunted me breathed hot and heavy on my neck. I spun. Nothing. I spun again. Nothing. Panicked, I struck out with both arms, swinging wild. If I could just see.

As if in answer to a prayer, a dim yellow light grew near my feet, filling the darkness with itself, illuminating nothing. A single sound cut through the cacophony: a slithering hiss that singed my spine with fear and brought bile into my throat. I knew what it was. The yellow light sharpened into two flat, slitted, alien eyes. Pit viper. The kind of venomous snake whose head would chase you after you’d severed it from the body. Low words, words I didn’t understand but whose meaning I knew instantly, told me to leave this place. What waited for me in the trees was hissing death.

Abruptly, the vision disappeared.

The empty cargo-bay door yawned. Outside, trees and undergrowth lurked behind the sagging shed. The shaman—if that’s what he was—had disappeared.

Once the Evil Eye has its grip, you’re lost. The open cargo door tempted me to leave. I could jump out now before my curse found me. Jump out, go home, save myself. My fingers itched for my day pack.

I shook my head to clear it. Medicine man tales, I said to myself. Shaman lies. I’d had a hallucination due to fatigue and stress. I lived in a world of science and technology. The Evil Eye was like the boogeyman, meant to scare and intimidate you into doing what someone else wanted. It couldn’t catch me or keep me. It couldn’t prevent me from going deep into the jungle.

“Let’s get this show on the road!” I called up to Carlos.

He gave me a thumbs-up. The plane jerked twice, then bumped down the strip, gaining speed. Straight brown tree trunks and masses of green leaves flitted by. Carlos pulled back on the stick and abruptly we were up, over the treetops, heading northwest.

Heading to a place where I wasn’t welcome.

But I’d survive.

Scooter’s life depended on it.

Chapter 4

Stuttering. It’s not a good sign at five thousand feet, whether it’s the pilot or the plane. In this case, it was the plane.

The bug nerd’s eyes opened, glared briefly toward Carlos’s broad back, and closed. I knew that look: You’re the tough man, you handle it.

Brilliant emerald treetops fluffed the ground. From above, the canopy shows you a solid-looking mass with an occasional peep-show peek at the really good stuff underneath. To see the real wealth of species—the dozens of monkeys, thousands of birds, bazillions of insects—you have to go in from the bottom.

North-north-west, where we were headed, the canopy abruptly rose and fell with the stubby Guiana Highlands. The high point, Serra do Apiau, was only around 3,300 feet, not even as high as most of the hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And nothing like the Rockies.

But the terrain wouldn’t make a nice landing pad. By the increased clattering of the engine and the intensity of the frown the bug nerd cast in Carlos’s direction, maybe we were going to need one.

On cue, the Cessna fell several feet, tossing my stomach up around my ears. Carlos’s right hand felt around over his head for some controls. The bug nerd got up, grabbed a steel rib and leaned out the cargo door. His hair whipped his left ear. He held his glasses in place with his free hand. Not a good place to be sick, I thought, but he levered himself back into the plane and headed to the cockpit.

I didn’t catch his first shouted words, but there was no mistaking the pale grimace of fear Carlos shot him in response. Time to be worried, I gathered. I got up and joined them, hanging on to a steel handhold over my head like a professional New York commuter.

“What’s going on?” I yelled over the chatter and chuff.

“Bad fuel!” the nerd shouted. “The engine’s about to quit!”

“Over my dead body!” Carlos spun dials. I could see his feet working some kind of pedals. “She hasn’t let me down yet!”

“If it’s bad fuel, you don’t have a choice!”

“Come on!” Carlos yelled at the plane. “We’re less than thirty miles from the strip!”

An earsplitting screech went off somewhere near my head.

“Shit!” Carlos shouted.

The plane shuddered, nose tipping. Chuff, chuff, a slower chuff, then the prop wound down like a bad dream. The engine spat and quit. The alarm screamed.

“Hold on!”

Carlos kept one hand tight on the W-shaped wheel and flipped some more switches. The one gauge I recognized—the altimeter—confirmed the hard lean pulling me forward. The nerd braced himself where the copilot’s seat should be and grabbed the matching wheel.

Out the window by Carlos’s head, various trees were rapidly becoming recognizable to my naked eye. Another bad sign.

“You’d better get back!” the nerd yelled at me. “We’re going to have to make an emergency landing! Find something to strap yourself down with!”

“Emergency landing?” I shouted back. “Where?”

“Airstrip ahead!”

I looked out the front windshield. A tiny airstrip, much tinier than the tiny airstrip we’d left an hour earlier, had been scraped out of the jungle. To my untrained eye, we looked way too high to land on that little ribbon. Next to it, a bevy of shacks and huts surrounded a huge, muddy gouge in the hillside that spewed brown water down a channel, feeding into a natural stream off the Rio Branco.

A gold mine. Probably illegal. Definitely dangerous. All male, all testosterone, all heavily armed.

“Get back!” the nerd shouted again, his eyes intense behind his lenses.

I hand-over-handed my way back down the twelve feet of cabin space and looked around. No parachutes. Nothing to use as a tie-down. In frustration I kicked my day pack and duffel into the tail area, then settled into my original seat, across from the open cargo door. The wind gushing in smelled greener, more lush, wetter. My shoulder fit snugly against the plane’s rib cage. The plane bucked and wobbled. My only comforting thought was that if I whacked my head good and hard during the crash landing, I’d at least be unconscious during the rape later.

Sudden tears stung my eyes. Dammit. A girl in my position wasn’t supposed to be afraid. Where’s your guff? Scooter’s voice chided gently. No girlie of mine is goin’cry, he had said over countless jammed fingers (softball), skinned knees (tree climbing), and a broken arm (off-road motorcycle). No ladybug I know is goin’ be skeered, he told me during storms (including two tornadoes), as I rode The Demon (his meanest adopted mustang), and after falling fifty feet down Eagle’s Nest while tethered to a threadbare rope (rock climbing).

No, sir. I scrubbed the tears away. I ain’t skeered.

The Cessna skittered sideways and dropped. When my butt made contact with the floor again, I grabbed the nearest tie-down ring. We bore down on the trees. Thick, humid wind flushed the fear stench from the plane. My mind flashed on tree limbs snagging our landing gear to pluck us from the sky.

That was my cue to worry about one thing at a time. No need to wear myself out over everything at once. Worry about the airplane end-over-ending first, a crash landing second, and getting raped third. Got it. I gritted my teeth.

The plane shuddered. Up front, Carlos knelt by an open compartment door, fiddling with something inside. The nerd wedged himself into the pilot’s seat and leaned on a control. I felt a glimmer of hope. Speak immaculate Portuguese and fly a plane? We might get out of this yet. The nerd shook his head, then hit the control again. Out the cargo door, I started seeing branches instead of leaves. We were dropping into the airstrip ribbon way too fast. The engine spat, choked, then rumbled.

Outside, the propeller hitched a couple of times before catching a groove to spin smoothly. The Cessna’s nose picked up just in time for its landing gear to smack the ground with the delicacy of a brick. I lost my grip on the tie-down ring and rolled toward the tail, my ribs grinding over protruding metal bits. The bouncing plane sailed up, fishtailed, hopped sideways, straightened out. We whacked the strip again and started to slow.

I looked up. The forest grew taller and taller and taller toward the windshield. The nerd stood his ground. We’d lose this game of chicken, no doubt about that. I took a deep breath and tried not to panic.

The Cessna abruptly skipped, wheels barking on the dirt, and jerked to a halt. I skidded face-first several feet and stopped where I’d started this trip, near the cargo door.

There was no sound other than the engine’s stutter and the rumble of generators filtering through the trees. From my sprawled landing position, I surveyed the crew. Carlos crouched next to the pilot’s chair, his arms curved over his head. Kinkaid sat in the chair, his hands still locked on the wheel.

The propeller whirred innocently.

Just freakin’ typical.

Kinkaid reached out, killed the engine. The prop wound down and stopped. Its three blades cast a shadow of the peace sign onto a copse of rubber trees inches away.

“Are you okay?” Kinkaid asked me over his shoulder.

I sat up. The ribs hurt, but didn’t move when I pressed them with my palm. I also took comfort from the fact I could stand and hadn’t thrown up yet. “Yeah. Nice landing.”

He unwedged himself from the pilot’s chair. “You all right?” he asked the floor, where Carlos was starting to unfold himself.

“Yes.”

Carlos and I looked at each other for a long moment.

“You’re fired,” I said.

I could hear shouts in the distance, growing closer. Time to start worrying about staying alive. I grabbed Kinkaid’s arm as he staggered to the tail section to check his gear.

“We’re scientists,” I said. “We’re just going to the research station. We are not journalists.”

“What?” He picked up his camera case.

“That stays here,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t—”

“If they think you’re a journalist, they’ll kill you.” When he stared at me, I added, “Don’t provoke anything. We’re going to the research station. That’s it. Nothing else.”

“Why would they kill us?”

“Because the mine is illegal,” Carlos answered from the cockpit. “This is Yanomamo land, and the miners have dug without government permission.”

“They’re paranoid about being stopped,” I said to Kinkaid. “Or robbed.” The voices outside grew louder. The distinctive, heavy, shung-clunk of a shotgun being racked made me lower my voice. “Don’t be stupid and we might get out of this alive.”

He nodded.

“That means keep your mouth shut,” I clarified.

He nodded again, shoving his glasses back onto his nose.

I shrugged into my day pack, ignoring my tender ribs. Showing weakness to a dog pack just feeds the frenzy. I needed to get out of this with Harrison’s ashtray, my forged CITES certificate, one cardboard tube for storing a Death Orchid, and my life.

Everything else was negotiable.

A strong brown hand gripped the door and a short man stuck his head through the cargo door. “Saia do avião!” Behind him, the shotgun’s nose beckoned us.

We climbed out and lined up beside the plane. Four men with rifles slung over their shoulders clambered in. In a moment, I heard my duffel unzipping and my stuff being pulled out. The short guy who’d spoken to us appeared to be in charge, probably the head donos, the mine foreman. Security would be part of his job. A much younger man held the shotgun on us, his face pasted with a “just doing my job” expression.

The donos smiled, revealing an archetypical gold front tooth. “You have come visit us,” Goldtooth said in English.

I felt Carlos tense beside me. “Bad fuel,” he replied. “We were lucky.”

Not quite as lucky as we might have been, I thought. The donos studied Carlos for a moment.

“We took bets whether you crash.” He slapped one broad hand into the other and grinned. “I lost!”

A tinkling bang inside the plane heralded the end of Kinkaid’s camera. In my peripheral vision, I saw Kinkaid’s jaw tense, but he kept his mouth shut. The donos shrugged. “Accident,” he said. “Too bad.”

When Goldtooth turned his attention to me, I dropped my gaze to his feet. I’m proud, but I’m not stupid. I’d save the I Am Woman tirade for when I was the one holding the shotgun.

“What you doing here?” Goldtooth asked. “What a woman need here?”

“I’m a scientist,” I replied. “Científico.” No, dammit, that was Spanish. “Cientista.”

I let my eyes wander from his muddy boots up worn work pants to his stout white cotton shirt. A few wiry hairs sprouted from the shirt’s open neck. “Studying plantas.” I chanced a glance at his face.

His black eyes had narrowed. I was starting to feel pretty good about those eyes not looking like a snake’s when I realized his nonviper gaze had settled below my neckline. Never mind my bulky, buttoned-up canvas-shirt look. This guy was interested in what lay beneath, which was a white cotton muscle tee, a white cotton sports bra—a not-too-shabby C—and a lot of sweat. Bugs buzzed my ear, but the deet kept them at bay. Too bad they didn’t make lech-repellant.

His fingers twitched. Abruptly he grinned. “Come to office!” he said. “You need Coca-Cola!”

The sullen young guy with the shotgun waved us down the airstrip toward the collection of hovels that served as mine headquarters. As we trudged along the airstrip’s rutted surface, the clatter of generators rose over the sheet-metal buildings. Now, at around ten in the morning, the sun was ready to bake us into crispy bits. I shrugged off the stray notion that we were descending into hell. I hadn’t been searched, I’d been allowed to keep my day pack, and the worst they’d done to my person was ogle.

All things considered, things were looking up.

The shotgun-toting guy stopped at an outlying building beside the airstrip. Beside the building, three Yanomamo women wearing brightly colored T-shirts and bowl-cut hairdos loitered in the shade, one holding an infant in her arms. A Yanomamo boy who looked about twelve chased a toad, aiming boy-sized arrows at it from his boy-sized bow.

The Shotgun Kid swung open the door and waved us inside the building. I’m glad I wasn’t expecting a blast of cool air because I didn’t get one. If anything, the heat was worse. Goldtooth motioned for us to move on through a small anteroom to the large office and sit down on the floor, then he disappeared.

A large metal utility desk sat square in the middle of the room with a wide wooden chair squatting behind it. A neat stack of papers held down one edge of the desk. A two-drawer metal filing cabinet hunched in the corner. Overhead, a ceiling fan vigorously flung stale air onto our heads.

I took the corner where I could see the door and the Shotgun Kid filling it. A third Brazilian lingered just outside the door. Kinkaid settled cross-legged next to me. For the first time I noticed he’d brought his own day pack with him. Good Boy Scout. Too bad his camera hadn’t made it. A thin trickle of sweat slid down his temple but he seemed calm. I wasn’t surprised. Landing the little plane the way he had took more nerve than I had.

Carlos hunkered down next to Kinkaid like he was sitting around a campfire. He looked a little too at ease for my peace of mind. Of course, he wasn’t one of two Americans in the room. Or a woman. My guess was that before this was over, he’d end up cutting a deal with the miners to make some of their supply runs into Boa Vista.

Goldtooth returned with three open glass-bottled Cokes. Refrigeration was too much to hope for, but a wet drink was a wet drink. He handed them out, let his thick, rough fingers scrape mine when I took the bottle from him. His grin, stretching through a fleshy face, made me think twice about taking a sip. I set the bottle’s warm butt on my knee.

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