Eventually, perhaps somewhere between a dozen and two dozen hours later, the phone at last rang. In such a strange and foreign setting, that humdrum trilling hum ought to have sounded a little peculiar to Sullivan’s ears. However, once again, Sullivan was well past feeling or even hearing, things the way the rest of us do.

He gave it two good, long rings before picking up. With a few hours already under his belt, what harm was there in delaying his gratification a little further?

“Sullivan,” he said, his voice not betraying a hint of frustration over the extended wait or the strange circumstances, but perhaps a smidgen of unease. This was, after all, the Commanding Officer.

“Sullivan,” a voice said back in one cold grunt, the way a snowball sounds when it collides with your cheek.

“Sir, I just wanted to say….” Sullivan began.

“Sullivan,” the Commanding Officer repeated, though this time with an inflection in his voice that suggested he hadn’t set up this meeting to solicit Sullivan’s thoughts.

Without the Commanding Officer having to say it in so many words, Sullivan got the impression that he was to speak only when spoken to and only to provide an answer to whatever it was he had been asked. It was, certainly, not the warm and jovial meeting full of bonhomie that, in moments of wild dreaming, he thought it might be. At the very least, he had hoped he might at least get to see the Commanding Officer. There was something decidedly unwelcoming about the phone, though whether it was its solitary position in that strange room or the way it made the Commanding Officer sound less like a man and more like a furnace, Sullivan couldn’t say. Still, while not ideal, Sullivan was speaking with the Commanding Officer, a long-held dream of his -- as long as you considered this bastardized form of conversation speaking. In reality, of course, this kind of interaction was to normal human conversation what arranged marriage was to speed dating. However, Sullivan had long ago stepped outside the bounds of reality. Such was the life of an ASP agent.

“I would like an update,” the Commanding Officer bellowed at last.

Sullivan considered his next words carefully, like a Dachshund’s nose at a popular bush.

“An update, Sir, on what exactly? Our recent apprehension of suspected Milieu members or ---”

“Sullivan,” the Commanding Officer said again, leading Sullivan to believe that he was up against another one-word admonishment with little room for interpretation. . “Tell me something I don’t know.”

This was a direction, albeit not a very helpful one. Not knowing what the Commanding Officer knew or didn’t know, it felt a little like being asked to find one specific needle in a stack of identical-looking needles.

Sullivan knew he didn’t have long to mull over his options, plentiful though they were. Nothing about the voice on the other end of the line suggested patience or openness to waiting. Sullivan couldn’t help but feel he was wasting the Commanding Officer’s time, second by excruciating second.

“I killed a Milieu operative,” he blurted out at last, though he didn’t know why he chose that particular news or if it was what the Commanding Officer wanted to hear.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Yes,” the voice replied back swiftly, suggesting in its temerity a desire to hear more.

“But,” Sullivan stammered,” we lost one of our own. My partner, Pacheco. It was something of a firefight.”

Silence. Perhaps not complete silence. Perhaps Sullivan heard a sigh, a pensive breath, or a cross exhalation of breath. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure he had heard anything. It was just as likely a hiccup in the secure line or the sound of his own confidence leaking out of his brain. But it did sound, remarkably, as if the Commanding Officer had really, truly betrayed an emotion -- a first, anger and impatience notwithstanding.

“It’s a shame,” the Commanding Officer muttered.

“Pacheco, sir?”

Another sound. A cough? No, it sounded more like a chortle. A laugh. The dismissive sound an elephant makes at an empty-handed zookeeper.

“No, not Pacheco. Dat Vinh.”

“Dat Vinh--,” Sullivan said, nearly choking on the words. “Dat Vinh Haliburton? The Milieu? A shame?”

It was impertinent. It was three questions Sullivan had no right to ask the Commanding Officer, especially not in that tone. But it was also unbelievable. Sullivan couldn’t help himself.

“What about Pacheco?” Sullivan asked after a long bout of impenetrable silence, adding one more transgression to his count. Truth be told, what he had really meant was What about Sullivan?

“There has,” the Commanding Officer offered by way of a response,” been a change of opinion at the Academy.”

Sullivan didn’t know what that could possibly mean.

“A sea change,” the Commanding Officer added, though this clarified nothing.

“Sir? What about Pachecho? She died. I know we’re not --- and I’m not saying I --. But, well, it’s one thing to not allow emotions into our work and it’s another entirely to call the death of the enemy a shame and not say a damned thing when one of your own falls.”

This sort of behavior was sacrilege. If Sullivan, on any other day, had heard someone using this kind of tone when talking about the Commanding Officer, never mind in direct discussion with the Commanding Officer, he would have been furious. Inconsolably furious. Yet, there he was. ASP wasn’t the only thing that had changed, apparently.

“You know what we’re here for,” the Commanding Officer said. At times, it seemed that their conversation was more like two soliloquies that, now and then, bumped into one another. Questions went unanswered. Words were repeated once, twice, a dozen times. There was no telling whose turn it was or what they might say next.

“Of course. To protect the Earth. To protect the people of the Earth, often from threats they can’t even fathom.” It was a paraphrased retelling of their creed, but it came close enough. Unless this too had changed. When the seas change, what do they unearth and what do they drown?

Something in the Commanding Officer’s silence suggested to Sullivan that the Man’s eyes were wandering, searching in the ether of whatever bomb shelter or high rise he sat in, for the next set of words he might use. The silence, then, was a time of wandering, a time of seeking out, a time to make out of thin air the truth, or its closest kin.

“The enemy used to be so much clearer to us. Much starker lines between good and evil.”

“What happened to change that?” Sullivan said, though he’d quickly wished he hadn’t.

“Nothing has stayed the same.”

Sullivan wanted to be done with the meandering. He was fed up with this half-step forward, three steps back form of storytelling. The Commanding Officer had called him there, hadn’t he? All of Sullivan’s years of hard, dutiful work, and yet it was only now that he was summoned. There had to be a reason. There had to be something more than this pockmarked, potholed route they were on.

Sullivan didn’t know what the Commanding Officer looked like, but, at that moment, he could picture perfectly what it would look like to throttle the man’s neck.

“The Milieu, Sullivan, is real.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. I killed one. After he killed one of ours.”

“That was a mistake.”

“What was a mistake?”

A pause. Again. Brief enough to not be measured in minutes or seconds even but deep enough to overflow and topple over with angst.

“What was a mistake?” he asked again.

“We need them. All of them. We can’t lose a single one more.”

“The Milieu? We need the Milieu? The same group of anarchists, of terrorists, that we’ve been fighting for decades? The ones who’ve been trying to topple the world order we’ve sworn to protect at all costs. The same ones who have been fighting against us, who would rather see the planet fall into chaos or be taken over by aliens than accept the world order as is? Those are the ones we need?”

One last pause. In his imagination, Sullivan was well past the point of throttling.

“They might have been wrong, but that doesn’t mean we were right.”