THE DISPOSSESSION OF DYLAN KNOX
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PART ONE:
California, the month of May
CHAPTER ONE
At first, Brooke suspected a trick. Within a day, she would wonder if her memory was starting to betray her. A week later, she would doubt her own sanity. And soon, she would come to question the sanity of the very universe itself.
Yet it all began so simply.
“Good Lord! Dylan Knox! I can’t believe it.”
“Have we ... met before?” His hand extended awkwardly in mid-air as her arms reached out for an embrace. She quickly drew them back to her side and tried to cover her discomfort with a laugh.
“Have we met? Dylan, it’s Brooke Chappelle ... from Larkmont High? I haven’t changed that much.”
His face remained blank.
Time lurched: a crystal-perfect memory overlaid with a jarring facade of present day that refused to fit.
She stared at him. “You really don’t remember? You went to Larkmont High School, right?”
“Yes.”
“We ... dated ... for quite a while.”
Dylan looked disconcerted, and there was something furtive in his eyes—it wasn’t recognition.
“I’m really sorry, but I honestly don’t remember you. It’s very nice to meet ... uh, to see you again, though. I ... hope our little factory has made an impression.” He was trying to change the subject gracefully, and she went along.
“Yes, absolutely. And the secretary-general is a big fan of space exploration—solar-power generation in particular. He’ll be thrilled to see all this. I hope you’ll be on hand next week because he’ll have lots of questions about your project.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” The restraint in his smile made her blink hard and turn away. As a trace of his scent caught her nostrils, her mind flashed with a memory of lips against lips, a warm palm on her breast, fingers trailing under the back waistband of her McGuire denims.
God, he couldn’t possibly fail to see her shiver and the flush on her face. How could she end this?
Hatfield and Brown were approaching, conspicuous in blue security-uniform suits. UN Public Affairs liaison Patrice Grayson was with them. This tour of Draconis Space Ventures was Brooke’s first time leading an advance party for an event on the West Coast, and Patrice had graciously offered to assist.
Brooke performed introductions, adding, “Dylan and I ... once knew each other.”
Dylan gave a stiff nod and Brooke caught a questioning look from Patrice as they all shook hands. He remained scrupulously professional but carefully detached as he described a few more details about the Draconis operation that their previous guide had glossed over. When the tour finally concluded, Brooke felt both relief and disappointment.
She didn’t get the chance to explain to Patrice until hours later in the hotel bar over pre-dinner drinks.
“He didn’t remember me at all,” Brooke said softly. “He wasn’t faking it.”
“Was he your first?” Patrice asked.
“No. No! In fact, we never did have sex all the way. I was sure we would after the prom, but a friend of ours got so pissed we had to take him to the hospital. That kind of killed the mood.” She laughed. “But it was ... serious, you know? At least, to me. Except after the prom I guess life just got in the way. My parents took me to visit Mom’s family in New Orleans for the summer and Dylan’s English father helped get him into aerospace engineering at Cambridge. That was pretty much it. We emailed and Skyped for a while, but by the time work brought him back to the States years later, we’d completely lost touch.”
“Hard to keep a long-distance relationship going, even as an adult.” Patrice nodded. “With all the temptations of first year at university, it’s probably hopeless. I remember those days.” She raised her apple martini and Brooke did the same with her gin fizz.
“Life’s a bitch,” she said, staring hard at the bubbles. In her mind was a page of calculus homework, the margins embroidered with scribbled variations of her name entwined with Dylan’s: Brooke Knox and Brooke Chappelle Knox.
# # #
She’d been looking forward to the trip to California. Late May weather in New York had offered little more than cold drizzle with a strong wind up the Hudson that had forced her moto jacket back into her closet. Makeup was nearly pointless in the wet cold, and spray from passing traffic flattened her hair like grocery flyers in a puddle. West coast sunshine would be such a relief.
Was the promise of sunshine what had given the secretary-general of the United Nations the urge to visit California? Niels Van Valkenburg was a cold fish—she couldn’t picture him on a beach. Maybe it was all about California’s governor personally taking him on a Hollywood tour. She was glad that her boss, Raimunda Devlin, Van Valkenburg’s executive assistant, had chosen to look after those arrangements herself. Brooke would have enough on her hands to corral the media and keep things moving smoothly during the secretary-general’s later visit to Draconis, the rocket-manufacturing facility. She knew squat about rockets, but she’d done the research she’d thought the junket required. None of it had warned her that the Mission Manager of Draconis’s Solaria energy project was Dylan Knox.
She was glad that this had only been an advance trip in preparation for the SG’s actual in-person visit. Her encounter with Dylan would have been far more embarrassing if the Big Boss had been present to witness it.
Lying in bed with a serious Beefeater buzz, Brooke tried deliberately to relive moments with the Dylan of Larkmont High. She couldn’t—linear recall was completely elusive. Even an attempt to picture him in his favorite places—the soccer pitch, the swimming pool—failed miserably. A smell or a texture could summon memory images so vivid the real world paled in comparison, but sensory images weren’t available at will.
What did that say about memory, about consciousness, about time?
Was it true that time was an ever-present continuum—that the direction humans perceived, from past toward future, was only illusion?
Was there a world where Dylan Knox and Brooke Chappelle were still together, forever?
How much would she have to drink to get there?
# # #
Brooke awakened the next morning with a mild hangover of gin and regrets. The advance assessment phase of her task was done, and today she would head back to New York.
But Dylan’s face was still in her mind. She’d once known that face better than her own, and sixteen years later he’d hardly changed at all: hair so blond it was almost silver, and a tiny pucker of scar to the right of his mouth like a permanent dimple. She’d kissed that scar more than a few times.
Her mind could never have forgotten those things—images of such intensity that her very brain cells had formed around them like pearls around grains of gold. How could they not be the same for Dylan?
She couldn’t be that forgettable, could she?
It was as if the adolescent Dylan she had known was utterly gone, replaced by an adult Dylan who was someone else entirely. What could produce such complete transformation? Some terrible trauma? A medical condition? She’d heard of extreme personality changes triggered by brain tumors and other injuries.
Or was it possible that he’d only been pretending not to know her? If so, the confusion and discomfort she’d read on his face had been the work of a consummate actor.
What conceivable reason could he have for such a deception? Had his feelings for her grown so bitter that he would try any ruse to prevent her re-entering his life? Or did he have some secret agenda that could be put at risk by someone from his past?
She snorted softly. That was the stuff of spy novels!
Yet, as her first coffee of the day seeped into her synapses tugging them alert, she played with the idea, more seriously:
What if he wasn’t the Dylan Knox she knew? What if his memories had deliberately been altered. Or….
What if the Dylan Knox at Draconis was an impostor?
They’d spoken for less than five minutes. Maybe any good actor could impersonate someone for that long. It happened in the movies.
No, that was ridiculous.
Wasn’t it?
Surely not even the most confident of impostors would try to fool a former lover.
There’d been just the slightest trace of a British softness to his r’s and o’s and a crispness to his t’s. Less than she remembered, though that was understandable after an extra decade in the US. On the other hand, an accent made a person easier to imitate—it drew attention away from other characteristics.
But he’d smelled the same, hadn’t he? Or was that a trick of the mind? As scents so potently triggered memories, could a memory trigger a scent?
What possible motive could there be to impersonate him?
She’d kept tabs on Dylan through other classmates long enough to know about his engineering degrees. A job at Draconis would make perfect sense. Could an imposter have replaced him sometime afterward? For what purpose? Draconis Space Ventures built spacecraft under government and private contracts, but she didn’t know if it did other government work that might involve secrets worth stealing.
God knew, world tensions were high. Global politics was rife with flashpoints—most often disputed territory containing oil reserves. There was talk of a critical top-level summit being negotiated to take place in China within the year. Brook hoped to be there—the secretary-general certainly would be.
Corporate espionage was a possibility. Or an effort by some foreign country to discredit private American space interests.
Soon she’d be imagining Dylan with a vodka martini in his hand—shaken, not stirred.
The Solaria mission to launch big solar collectors into space and beam energy back to Earth didn’t seem the stuff of international intrigue.
Unless it was a sinister plot to create the ultimate space weapon.
She giggled out loud at that one. Then the giggle turned into a fit of laughter that swept away the worst of her hurt long enough for her to pack and catch her flight back to New York.
