Chapter 17: Horatio's Line — 'I Won't Help You Destroy Yourself'

The map had been on the wall for eleven days.

Daniel had not intended it as a map when he started — it was a sheet of butcher paper purchased from a kitchen supply store on Wisconsin Avenue, the kind of paper you lay under a turkey, which he had thought was funny in a way that no longer registered as funny. He had taped it to the wall beside the window and begun writing in a cramped hand, using a black marker that bled slightly at the edges and left every letter looking slightly more emphatic than intended. Financial threads. Procurement nodes. Names in boxes. Lines between them in two colors — confirmed connections in black, hypothesized ones in red — and by now the red lines outnumbered the black by a ratio that should have troubled him more than it did.

He had been looking at it for twenty minutes when he heard Horatio's key in the lock.