GRAY HUNTERS

Twenty-six years ago a coast highway took Elena Vance's parents in a column of light. She was eight. She was wearing her mother's leather cord, and she had been told never to take it off.

Now Elena is a CIA targeter, the best the Agency has at finding what other people lose. Her latest model points at a stretch of Pacific coast, a window five days wide, and a taking that hasn't happened yet. Something she has carried since she was a child begins to answer her.

Governments signed a treaty with beings who are tall, pale and extremely polite. The crews who clean up after it call themselves Gray hunters, because it is what you call yourself when you are ashamed of the work. Nobody will tell her what the cord was for. The man who trained her knows, and he has been lying for twenty-six years.

The cord kept the sky quiet. She is about to decide whether it should.

A paranoid thriller about locks, leashes and the question nobody asked.