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