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had to stop designing and tend bar to help pay for Renee’s law school. They had started as two people in love, with doctoral degrees and debt. They’d survived a bankruptcy. They’d survived a miscarriage. When they were in their late twenties, Andrew’s first patent was bought up by Apple for eight hundred dollars and they’d gotten mad drunk on tequila and made love until dawn.
    Andrew made the cover of Wired magazine at thirty and Renee gave up a partner-track position at a law firm to serve as general counsel and CFO. Their first million-dollar contract was followed ninety days later by a seven-million-dollar contract.
    The more successful they were, the less time they spent in the same room. Neither of them noticed at first.
    Renee moved the company to Maryland, lured by a lush state-tax incentive. They had become a company swirling around a nucleus of Andrew and his uncanny ability to design the next big thing .
    She jogged around the massive Alcázar de Segovia, the strangely Disneyesque stone castle built on a Roman foundation. The day was gorgeous and the sun glinted off the sea. Keeping up a grueling pace, she passed into a dodgier neighborhood outside the walled city.
    Last year she and Andrew had met Barry Tichnor, a managing partner at the nation’s largest defense contractor, Halcyon/Detweiler. Barry oversaw the research-and-development arm of the multinational. He’d taken the couple out to dinner at a two-story French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Over hors d’oeuvres, he’d told them that Halcyon/Detweiler, with $317 billion in profits that fiscal year, was looking to subcontract some research-and-design work for the Pentagon. The name Malatesta had come up in more than one board meeting.
    â€œOur plants are designed to gin up jet fighters and battle tanks,” Barry told them over a savory tourtière. “The … devices we’re talking about are a bit smaller.” The money would be more than their firm had made since its inception. And since it would be classified defense work, there would be almost no congressional oversight.
    Andrew had wanted no part of it at first. But Renee knew this was their big break. This was the brass ring. It took three months to persuade her husband. In the end, it had been the challenge, not the profits, that brought him around.
    She returned to the older section of Segovia and the massive Roman aqueduct looming over everything. She bought a bottled water and stood on one leg, stretching the other, her cross-trainer up against her bum, then stretched the other leg. She watched the well-to-do of Europe, Asia, and America joking, taking photos, consuming conspicuously. She lived in Segovia sixty days a year, more or less, and had learned fluent Spanish, which meant that, like every other ex-tourist, she had come to loathe tourists.
    After the initial meetings with Tichnor, Andrew had been in The Zone. She hadn’t seen him for days at a time. He’d set up a kind of apartment in the basement of their leased building and slept there more nights than not, near his computers and drafting board and three-dimensional, holographic-design computers.
    She remembered the day she had arranged the lunch with Barry Tichnor and Andrew and herself. Andrew had brought his vade mecum, a nicked and scratched saddlebag he’d found in an antique shop in Santa Monica, the same year he and Renee met, and which he’d carried with him everywhere ever since. Between courses of dim sum, Andrew dragged out his sketch pad and showed it to Barry.
    Barry removed his eyeglasses and peered at the sketches. “Is that…” He flipped a page. “My lord…”
    Andrew had actually blushed and had taken his book back, shoving it into the saddlebag with its hokey leather fringe. “Ah, it’s just a couple of ideas. Things we might try.”
    â€œNo, no.” Barry slipped the glasses back on.