Chapter Six
Oh, God, God, God. Now what am I going to do?
Ann lay on the bed in her motel room, fists clenched. The chill that she'd felt as soon as she set foot in the Green Hills Nursing Home and Clinic had deepened as soon as she'd seen Stringfellow Hawke sitting in that wheelchair. She didn't think she was ever going to feel warm again.
She should have known. John Bradford Horn hadn't told her anything about having captured Hawke; she'd only found out by the merest chance, a fragment of overheard phone conversation when he thought she was nowhere around. After that, she'd had to wait for an opportunity to go through his records. And she'd found the whole thing.
How Horn had kept Hawke under surveillance for several weeks before engineering that motorcycle crash in the Los Angeles canyon. How they'd scraped him up off the pavement and taken him, unconscious but otherwise relatively uninjured, to a safe house, where Dr. Fairling had immediately begun treating him using the new and improved regimen she'd apparently been working on since Hawke had escaped from them the last time. Potent drugs, hypnosis, the judicious application of pain for a bit of extra persuasion. Can't the woman find anything better to do with her time? Angelica had thought, reading the description of what Hawke had been put through.
Her mind's eye kept seeing that ominous sentence in one of Dr. Fairling's reports ‒ "The treatment has succeeded in almost completely eradicating all capability for independent thought in the subject."
Yup. She should have known right there that coming to find Hawke was a bad idea.
"How could you do this to him? Again?" she asked the light in the ceiling.
What was it that John Bradford Horn wanted from Stringfellow Hawke? There were hints that he had another project afoot that would probably require a weapon on the scale of Airwolf, but no more than hints. Why grab Hawke so early? And why this whole charade of turning him into a vegetable and stashing him away in a loony bin on the other side of the country? Hawke had powerful friends; the longer he was missing, the more danger there was that they would figure out what had happened to him. If Horn wanted him to fly Airwolf, why not just hold him prisoner? Kidnap his best friends, or his dog, or whatever he valued the most, in order to coerce him to do whatever it was Horn needed him to do, rather than go through all this?
And what was it about that damned helicopter? What made it, and Hawke, the only two keys to success for whatever it was that Horn was trying to accomplish, if he was actually trying to accomplish anything at all? There were other helicopters out there. There were other pilots. Hell, John Bradford Horn had what amounted to his own private army.
The only answer she could think of was that he wanted Stringfellow Hawke so that he could grind him under his heel. Turn him into a pathetic creature stuck in a wheelchair to be gloated over, counted in the inventory along with all his other possessions. Seventeen homes worldwide, probably thirty cars, two Learjets, twenty-three million dollars' worth of artwork, and, oh yeah, one mindless helicopter pilot who thought he was smarter than me. Hawke had outwitted him ‒ twice ‒ blown up Horn's costly and supposedly impregnable base in Texas, and thwarted his later attempt to steal Airwolf. You just couldn't do that to John Bradford Horn and not know that sometime, somehow, he was going to do his utmost to destroy you. Only a handful of times to Ann's knowledge had anyone managed to beat or best the man, and each time he'd made it his business to ensure the other party paid for it, one way or another.
There were some signs that the situation with Hawke wasn't completely permanent, though. Obviously he couldn't fly in the shape he was in now, so if Horn did plan on using him as a pilot again, the conditioning must be reversible, at least to a certain degree. Horn would still need to keep him on a leash, but he would have to be sufficiently compos mentis to do his normal brilliant job of flying. Dr. Fairling had made it clear in her reports that they couldn't go too far. It was also plain that she'd found it difficult to overcome his resistance in the first place; and there were hints that it also hadn't been easy to strike a balance between keeping him oblivious and docile, and causing total, permanent mental breakdown. One of her most successful strategies appeared to have been implanting the idea into his subconscious that Airwolf itself was something to be feared. If he hears a helicopter flying overhead, he becomes irrational with terror. He thinks it's coming to hunt him down and kill him.
Oh, how Horn must have enjoyed hearing that one.
Dr. Fairling had been a bit more vague about the reversal of the whole mess. She seemed to be pinning most of her faith in yet another drug, along with some heavy-duty hypnotic cutting and pasting. There were also some indications that, left to his own devices, there was a danger that Hawke might recover on his own, or at least regain some of that capability for independent thought. Which was why the doctor had told Horn explicitly that she'd thought it was a really bad idea for her to be pulled away now to work on another project.
Some other poor soul whose brain needs to be pulled apart and then reassembled in a different order, no doubt. Daddy dearest, I am never, ever going to understand you.
Maybe it's saner not to.
When she'd found that Dr. Fairling was leaving for Dubai the day after Christmas, she'd decided that it was time to take a trip to New Hampshire, and she put a considerable amount of ingenuity into getting the doctor's forged signature onto the letter that would get her into the clinic. She made the decision to go not as Angelica Horn, but as herself, Ann Strete. Her real name, the one she'd given up when she began playing the role of daughter in John Bradford Horn's script. The role whose sole purpose was to lure men into Horn's clutches, on command. Even though she knew what Horn's purpose was, and found it disgusting. Her conscience, or lack of it, hadn't been strong enough to make her give up all the perks that went along with the part: the clothes, the cars, the homes in exotic locations with every need catered to. It had even been worthwhile to put up with sex with Horn. Not that that happened very often. He only really got his thrills from controlling people. No, all things considered, it had been a decent tradeoff.
Until she met Stringfellow Hawke, and discovered for the first time a man that she didn't want to see enmeshed in Horn's megalomaniac schemes. The first time that she'd been truly unhappy when confronted with the handiwork of Dr. Fairling and her cohort of mad scientist types, and the first time that she'd seriously considered betraying her ersatz father.
She had no idea how Hawke might have felt about her after he'd managed to escape, but figured that the only reason he'd ever be happy to see her again would be if the encounter gave him the chance to put a bullet through her heart. She couldn't blame him. So she'd allowed Horn to drag her along with him when he went to ground after that debacle in Texas, and life went on.
Hawke, in his right mind, probably wanted her dead. If Horn found out what she'd just done, he would certainly kill her. Even so, she'd decided to chance it. Call it a New Year's resolution.
And now she wasn't sure that her big, brave, defiant gesture was worth anything at all. In spite of what Dr. Fairling's grisly reports had said, she'd still harbored the hope that she would be able to talk to Hawke, make him understand how badly she felt about what had happened. Maybe she'd even wanted to lay the burden of forgiveness on him, hoping that he would see that it hadn't all been her fault, that she wasn't a completely evil person. Maybe, if she could think of a way to do it, she could pull him out of Horn's spider web.
But most of all she'd wanted to see the man that she'd claimed to want and to care about. And all she'd found was some guy who probably needed someone else to wipe him off when he used the toilet.
She should just turn right around and go back home again before Horn found out where she'd gone.
But could she really turn her back on Stringfellow Hawke again, and leave him there to rot? Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she thought there'd been a spark of life when she'd held his hand and told him who she was. Or it might have been when she'd told him who he was. Maybe he hadn't recognized her, maybe he just realized that here was someone from the outside world, who might take him back there with her.
The conditioning had to be reversible.
It was too bad that she could think of no easy way to get him out of that place and keep both of them safe long enough for him to recover on his own. Those powerful friends of his, they could help. But she had no idea how to contact them. You couldn't exactly look up a covert agency in the Yellow Pages.
Of course, she could look up Santini Air. But the people there ‒ Dominic Santini and that red-haired woman pilot she'd seen watching her at the hangar when she'd first pushed her way into Hawke's life ‒ might be even more likely to shoot her first and ask questions later.
She had a little time. She had tried to cover her tracks well enough that Horn, if he was sufficiently preoccupied with this thing in Dubai, wouldn't notice that she wasn't skiing in Aspen. She'd go back to the clinic until she could find Hawke on a good day. Maybe somebody there could help?
Yeah, right. They were probably all in Horn's pocket. In which case she was already dead.
Well, if she was, then she needed to decide ‒ and fast ‒ if she might as well spend her last hours trying to do something useful, or whether she should just run like hell.
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Elena was torn between delight in the fact that String had finally had a visitor, and disappointment at having missed her. The staff who had seen Ann Strete didn't think she'd be back. The clinic and its residents had obviously given her the creeps, and if she'd been expecting to see her "old friend" looking remotely normal, String would have been a big shock.
Elena couldn't blame her, but she desperately hoped the woman would come back.
The second week of January began. Most of the patients at the clinic came down with either a cold or flu. String developed a slight case of the sniffles and a major case of irritability. Both Karen and Luisa preferred him staring off into space; Elena was glad to see some sign of emotion, but after a few days wished it would take some form other than scowling and being generally uncooperative. Maybe the mystery woman's visit had stirred something up in his mind. If so, it didn't seem to be fond memories.
One afternoon he suddenly looked straight at her and said, "Who the hell is she?"
It was about the first coherent thing he'd said for over a month, but she had no idea what he was talking about. "I don't know who you mean, String."
"She said her name was Angelica. I should know her. She told me my name is String ‒ String ‒ " His voice, between the cold and a month's disuse, was thick and harsh, and stumbled to a halt on the words.
"String what?" asked Elena softly.
He shook his head angrily. His right hand formed into a fist and thumped the arm of his chair. "Don't know. Can't remember." He drifted off.
Elena was jubilant. It was a start. Starting over, maybe. But anything was better than nothing.
More than ever, she wanted to have a talk with Ann Strete.