The Orchid Hunter

by Sandra K. Moore

  “I’m investigating plant smuggling as prohibited by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. I assume you’re familiar with it, ma’am.”

  I crammed the used wipe back in its pouch, then retrieved my duffel and started repacking my stuff. “I know CITES.”

  “And you know a man called Lawrence Daley.”

  “Yeah, you just missed him. He’s probably already in the States.”

  “Yes, ma’am, he is in the States, picked up by my team in Miami.”

  I felt a satisfied smile welling up in my soul but squelched it before it reached my face. Daley must be cursing his karma. Very nice, Special Investigator Shoemaker.

  “He had on his person two specimens of a heretofore unknown orchid,” he continued. “An orchid he tells me you know a lot about.”

  His eyes studied my face, but I’d played way too much poker with Scooter’s wily retirement home friends. I kept packing. “I know enough about it to know it’s illegal to transport it across an international boundary,” I said in all seriousness. “Isn’t it used in some of the native medicine?”

  “That’s what his employer thinks.”

  Surprise. “Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh is interested in ethnobotany?”

  Shoemaker’s lips pinched, like he’d caught me at something. “So you know something about Mr. Daley.”

  “Come on,” I retorted. “You know how small this world is. He’s been working for Thurston-Fitzhugh for three years. So he got caught orchid smuggling. It happens.”

  “It hasn’t happened to you.”

  “All my orchids are certificated under CITES.” The certificates were just usually forged, like the ones I carried for the Death Orchid.

  “I can’t let you back in the States with that plant,” Shoemaker drawled. He shifted his weight back on his heels. “Daley wasn’t working for Thurston-Fitzhugh. The British government picked her up in a raid on her nursery a month ago.”

  I struggled for a moment with the image of the heavily coifed Constance raking a tin cup across the steel bars of her dingy jail cell, demanding another splash of Dom Pérignon.

  It was bound to happen. Occasionally a nursery or private collector ticks somebody off and the jealous tickee drops a hint about where a huge collection of illegal plants can be picked up. Next thing you know, the government descends in the middle of the night with automatic rifles and attack dogs. Don’t scoff. It’s happened. The plants all find their way either into the tickee’s pet botanical garden stash or wilting in a windowless warehouse because no one has any idea how to care for them. Only God knows how many one-of-a-kind specimens had perished that way.

  But I was curious about Lawrence. “So who’s Daley working for?”

  “Cradion Pharmaceutical.”

  My stomach clenched. Stunned, I could only stare at Shoemaker. “So Daley is Noah?”

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, not batting an eye that I knew the alias. “We have reason to believe Noah is here in Brazil, but we haven’t been able to find him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I’ve heard his name in passing, that’s all. I take it you know his work?”

  Shoemaker shrugged. “Hearsay says he’s a collector like yourself, done a couple of one-off contract jobs for Cradion in the past. That’s about all we know from our surveillance.”

  “Impossible. I know all the orchid collectors.”

  “He collects more than orchids. And he keeps an even lower profile than you, Dr. Robards,” he said, telling me he knew that was my current stage name. “The only way we figured out who you were was by running a check on everyone who’d participated in a Cradion drug trial over the past year. That turned up your great-uncle. We still had an interesting time connecting him to you.”

  Well, hell. That meant my mug and real name would end up pasted all over international airports. Changing my stage name every six months or so had helped me travel pretty much unmolested by customs. Most collectors did the same. The only exception to that general rule was Daley, and look where that had got him.

  But I’d deal with that problem later. I rolled my pant leg down over the slash just beginning to crust over. “Why are you checking Cradion’s patient list? It’s a legitimate pharma, isn’t it?” Knowing Scooter’s wacky herbal tendencies, it wasn’t.

  He set the flashlight on the rock between us, pointing it up to shoot a swath of light into the canopy. “It’s legitimate. It’s produced several popular over-the-counter drugs in the last five years. All FDA approved. But a Cradion contract employee came to the FBI a couple of weeks ago with the story that a subsidiary biotech lab in San Antonio is creating bioterrorist weapons.”

  I knew the truth before I said it. “The lab that poisoned my uncle.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were they testing one of their ‘weapons’ on my uncle?”

  “We can’t say that for sure.” Shoemaker’s closed expression said they were. Bastards. “I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why we’re so interested in the plant,” he continued. “It’s why we picked up Daley. Our technicians are running tests on the orchid now, to see just how potent it really is.”

  “You think it’s being used to create this bioterrorist weapon.”

  “We can’t let it fall into the wrong hands. That’s why if you had one, I couldn’t let you take it back.”

  I studied Shoemaker’s broad, open face. There was obviously plenty he wasn’t telling me, and I don’t like plenty. Plenty gets peons like me killed in the cross fire. If people would just tell you the whole story from the get-go, things would be a helluva lot easier.

  But it sounded like von Brutten might be in the middle of it. Von Brutten had told me his own pharmaceutical company, Lexicran, was in direct competition with Cradion over the Parkinson’s cure, but that might have been only part of the story. Was his group formulating a bioweapon from the Death Orchid? Or had he told me the truth, that he was after a miracle cure, and it was Cradion that was after the bioweapon?

  I zipped up my duffel and stood. My leg ached, but it was surface, pulling at the skin. Just enough to be annoying.

  Shoemaker stood, too, watching me hoist the bag onto my shoulder. “We could use your help to track down Noah.”

  “You think he’s down here for Cradion?” I asked, knowing the answer. Hell, the Brain had practically told me he intended to hire Noah. Which meant the Brain worked for Cradion as well. Cradion was serious if they’d sent two collectors, Daley and Noah.

  “Do a little undercover work for us,” Shoemaker said. “Be our eyes and ears. If we can find Noah, we can link him to the pharma and shut it down.”

  I laughed at the thought: Jessica Robards, Secret Agent. “You don’t want me. I’m about as subtle as a jackhammer in a tin can.”

  “It’d be a chance to serve your country.”

  “Appealing to my higher motives,” I said. “Very nice. I guess Daley didn’t tell you I don’t have any.” I hooked my thumbs through the pack’s straps and hitched them up a little higher on my shoulder. “My only goal right now is to get home and see my great-uncle before he dies. If I’m interested after that, I’ll call you.”

  São Paolo’s Guarulhos International Airport sported an extremely bleached and ammonia-smelling ladies’ room. A wide table, presumably for changing diapers, was shoved up against the end wall. A short line of sinks sat under a long mirror that stretched the length of the wall facing the stalls. At just before noon, I expected the ladies’ to be standing room only, but the last occupant, stylishly stilettoed as only Brazilian women can be, finished touching up her plum-colored lipstick and huffed out as I, the riffraff, walked in.

  I hiked my and Rick’s duffels onto the table to re-sort our stuff. After heading back toward Ixpachia Research Station at a leisurely pace for a couple of hours to throw off Shoemaker, then doubling back to the gold mine where Rick waited for me, I was too tired to do anything
but sleep on the plane ride from the gold mine to São Paolo. Rick was pretty beat, too, but luckier than I was: I drew the short straw on the division of labor. While Rick arranged our flights to Houston, I was going to repack. I’d put my orchids in Rick’s duffel for the run from Shoemaker, on the off chance I got caught and searched. Time to put things back where they belonged.

  Still, I wasn’t too annoyed. It gave me a chance to have a quick sink bath and put on my flowing turista dress for the ride back. I pulled the dress from Rick’s duffel and draped it over a stall door to let the wrinkles fall out of it. At least I wouldn’t look like an extra from a B-grade action movie starring The Rock.

  I quickly transferred our gear into the correct duffels, pausing to admire the Cattleya delictabus I’d collected for Scooter. A tiny thing, its pink flowers reminded me a little of cherry blossoms. Scooter would love it. I eased it back into its cardboard cylinder, which I then shoved into my duffel along with the forged CITES certificate.

  While I hit the high spots with the soap and a towel, I pondered the conversation with Shoemaker. He’d said a lot in a very short amount of time, none of it good. Maybe Rick and I could go over it on the flight to Houston.

  Had Scooter really ended up in a drug trial that was testing a bioterrorist weapon? I couldn’t imagine any terrorist worth his salt taking that kind of risk. What would be the point? If you were developing a lethal drug and wanted to test on humans, wouldn’t you have the money to hide your testing activities? Or test on people whose deaths you thought no one would notice, like homeless people or drug addicts?

  And would Marcus Donovan’s CIA-powered lab information on the blood-that-wasn’t-blood square with what Shoemaker had told me about a bioterrorist weapon? I didn’t know how many contacts the FBI and CIA shared, but it’d be interesting to know how widespread the Cradion investigation might be. Not that Marcus would tell me but, with any luck, he’d at least have some information about Dr. Harrison. I hoped my old mentor was still alive. I wanted to see him after this little adventure, tell him I’d found his Death Orchid. He’d be pleased.

  But that thought brought me around to von Brutten again. Too many things had happened at the same time: Scooter got sick, Harrison disappeared, von Brutten hired me to find the Death Orchid. Those were the good guys. Then, according to Shoemaker, Cradion also hired Lawrence Daley and Noah to go after the plant, and a Cradion contractor had turned himself in to the FBI. Had Harrison been kidnapped or killed by Cradion? And why? He wasn’t a medical research scientist. I felt like I was still missing half the story.

  And what did the Brain have to do with any of it?

  I shook out my dress, then threw it on over my head. Regardless of what was really going on, von Brutten’s lab had better be able to do something positive with this orchid, I thought, provided I could get it there in one piece. Thanks to Shoemaker, I knew to watch my back for Cradion’s minions trying to steal my plants.

  I brushed out my hair thoroughly for the first time in days. It had grown out a little and was starting to show a glossy, deep red at the roots. I kind of missed its real color, but it made me stand out like a sore thumb. Time to color it again. Or not. Rick would probably like it red—all natural, of course. I’d ask him. Heck, I could go buy some hair coloring and take it back to something close to its original red. I had time.

  I studied my reflection. The tiniest of crow’s-feet suggested I’d be leaving my late twenties behind soon. The rest of me looked lily fresh, with a touch of sunburn across my nose. Even without makeup, my eyes stood out, more green than gray in this light.

  Scooter liked to say that every woman was beautiful at some point in her life, whether it was when she was a girl, a coltish teenager, a young woman, in middle age, or a senior. Knowing my luck, I’d be gorgeous at eighty-two. Better yet, I’d been gorgeous at five. No knockout right now, I decided, but I’d pass for kind of cute. I’d take it. Kind of cute had risen in my estimation since I met Rick.

  A flash of metal caught my eye as I turned to check for a protruding clothes tag. Rick’s medallion lay in the open neck of my dress. He was right. Very pretty.

  Leaning forward, I studied it in the mirror. The side facing out was a moth of some kind, no surprise there. I turned it around and tried to read the inscription backward. Finally I unclasped it and took it off. The inscription was simply his full name: Alistair Richard Kinkaid.

  Alistair? I could see why he went as Rick. Rick suited him.

  Then every ounce of blood in my body went cold. I carefully pooled the chain and medallion on the porcelain sink.

  I unzipped Rick’s duffel bag again. Hands trembling a little, I moved his moth case and monitoring equipment to the side. There, in the bottom of his bag, safely sealed in a plastic bag, lay the remains of a Death Orchid, mostly intact but clearly dying. One of its original flowers had been pinched or cut off the stem, and its pseudobulb—the fat root where it stored sustenance—had been sliced open.

  It must be the plant the shaman had used to concoct his poison.

  In a pouch on the back of the bag was a folded CITES certificate. I took out the piece of paper and studied it. An excellent forgery, seals in the right color, expertly written signatures. Hell, it looked real.

  Why would Rick have a Death Orchid in his gear? It was useless now for feeding his moth. There was no reason in the world for him to have it.

  Except one.

  I almost laughed. Low profile, indeed. He’d taken me for a ride I wouldn’t forget. And would never forgive.

  I picked up the medallion again. Alistair Richard Kinkaid. A.R.K.

  Noah.

  Chapter 15

  I gripped the sink with both hands. Rick’s necklace dangled from my fingers. I stared at my own stunned expression in the mirror, trying to make it all make sense, while my stomach plunged to my feet.

  Was I that stupid?

  I thought back, from the beginning, over what we’d talked about, things he’d said. He’d never told me who or what he worked for. His contact with Dr. Yagoda had centered on either their shared history, Rick’s being Yagoda’s student, or the gold mine situation. Rick had described his trip down as a hunt for the Corpse Moth.

  But the clues were there. He knew the pharmaceutical industry processes inside and out. He’d argued with me over a little-known genus of Streptocarpus like he knew what he was talking about. He’d shown up in the Amazon at the same time I had. Hell, he’d said to me that first night at the research station: I think we’re looking for the same thing.

  I had simply assumed Rick worked as a researcher at a university. Rick had never said whether he did or didn’t. He hadn’t lied to me.

  Unless you counted his silence when I bared my soul and told him about Scooter.

  He’d said nothing. Absolutely nothing. I didn’t expect him to tell me he was hunting the orchid for a bioterrorist group, but he might have said, “Oh, yeah, I’m working for a pharmaceutical company.” Instead, he’d followed one of the basic rules of illegal plant collecting: don’t let anyone know what you’re after or why.

  We were mercenaries after the same prize, just pursuing it in different ways. I used my botanical knowledge, he used a moth. Hell, I had used him and his moth to find the orchid. Then he’d turned around and used me to actually retrieve it. I couldn’t fault him for being what I was.

  But as my reflected eyes grew overbright, I felt the first hint of anger. I’d talked myself into believing he was a really good guy, a keeper, the one I’d stay with and maybe not just for a while. When it came to motives, he’d lied to me when I’d been straight with him.

  Part of me wanted to argue. Rick had proved himself more than once to be a whole-earth kind of guy. He really had been upset with himself over getting the Yanomamo village attacked. Even now Marcello’s death weighed on him like a millstone. He’d worked hard alongside Father João to tend the wounded. And he’d spouted all that verbiage about protecting the rain forest habitat.

  Which
a savvy field operative would do if he were interested in protecting his supply of Death Orchids.

  That was true. He’d only need them around in the wild, or cultivated on-site, for however long it took his lab cronies to replicate the Death Orchid alkaloids. Hell, if the Death Orchid poison made assassination look like a heart attack—and turned out to be untraceable—how valuable would it be to terrorist organizations all over the globe? And what better place to test it than on a group of seniors suffering from Parkinson’s disease?

  A desperate part of me kept up the protest. Maybe Rick didn’t know who he was working for. The Brain was only going to use him if the Death Orchid’s location—which was recorded on the paper I’d stolen from him on the River Walk—hadn’t turned up. Maybe Rick did his own work with the best of intentions and never knew he was being used.

  But if that were the case, there’d be no reason not to tell me he was working for a pharmaceutical company.

  Which meant he knew what he was doing. He’d charmed me, and sucked me in, and used me. Like no one ever had.

  I’d given him everything I had, and look where it got me. Again.

  I swiped my palms over my wet cheeks, hands trembling with rage.

  Good. I needed that anger now. I wanted it to boil hard and then go cold as ice so I could do what I needed to do next.

  Rick stood haloed in an oblong of sunlight, waiting for me in the lobby. Now a little after noon, tourists were arriving for their flights home. Voices ricocheted from the high ceiling. Wheeled suitcases and trunks clicked across the tiled floor. A few people headed straight for the ticket counter but the majority idled around, either trying to find other members of their party or figuring out where they could best stand to block the doors.

  I stepped into the crowd, a duffel in either hand. The mob grew quickly, becoming a tide of bodies pushing to the security area and swirling in little eddies near the ticket counter. Rick’s gaze swept over me twice as he scanned the human river, then he blinked and snapped back to me. His slow smile brought his bad boy straight to the surface.