Free Instinct (2010) by Ben Kay Page A

room was a row of lockers, a table and chairs and a small TV and video-games console that had taken a year of complaints to acquire. The soldiers’ area was identical, except they had an X-Box instead of a Wii.
    In between the two sleeping quarters was the rec room, which contained the pool and table tennis tables along with DVDs and a widescreen TV on which to watch them. It was also the scene of many heated arguments, as the soldiers preferred to watch blockbuster action movies, while the scientists argued for more cerebral choices, often involving subtitles and more intricate plotting.
    The canteen served to produce microwaved, nutritionally balanced readymeals, delivered monthly and kept in a large freezer. Food was consumed in a square room containing four large plastic tables with benches on either side, long enough to ensure that anyone could eat separately if the mood took them. Favourite meals were eaten first, usually leaving a week of chili at the end of each month.
    Steven Bishop’s office was the only room furnished with a touch of humanity. Instead of stark white plastic, its surfaces were expensively shabby wood and leather, ostensibly to let visitors know that Bishop was both different and the boss. This effect was alsoachieved through the size of the room. It held a ten-person conference table at one end, for large meetings that never happened. The door from the corridor opened first to a vestibule, with the office door to the right and another to the left which led to Bishop’s living room and decidedly non-capsule sleeping quarters.
    Opposite the elevator in the lobby, the corridor scooped round into a warren of labs, the scene of any long-term experimentation. Although almost all the work in MEROS happened within a hundred feet of the elevator, there were many other laboratories, stretching back further than most of the soldiers and scientists were allowed to go.
    The absence of the military personnel would normally leave the facility in a subdued state of low-level experimentation. However, a new resident had caused significant disruption to Bishop’s routine: Andrew sat in a buffalo leather armchair across the desk from him, removing and replacing the cover of a memory stick. Although he was not aware of it, each click of the thin plastic seemed to twist a rusty screw further and further into the centre of Bishop’s brain. It took thirty-five for him to snap.
    ‘Will you please stop that?’
    Andrew did as he was told. He was now so frightened and miserable he felt like a slight and tiny version of the boy he was when he left England.
    The situation he found himself in became even more crushing when he remembered how excited hehad been when the journey began. The moment those two big men approached him at the school gates, fixed him with those serious eyes and explained in deep American accents that they needed his cooperation, he felt important, like he was part of something real and grown-up.
    That feeling multiplied when he climbed into the wide, dark car and it sped off through the rain. As he rolled through the gates of RAF Marham, he was fizzing with the thrill of it all: the blistering roar of the landing jets; passing through security with nothing more than a salute; and the sight of the fighter planes, toy versions of which he still played with.
    But then he met the other man, the one who took him on a long, long flight to somewhere called Guantanamo Bay; the one who didn’t let him pee until they left the plane; the one who forgot to explain how scary take-off and landing were, and didn’t seem to notice when Andrew shook with fear at the screaming engines.
    Bishop was a dismal child-minder: uncaring, uninterested and keen to keep his homeward journey unchanged despite the passenger he was looking after. Eight hours on a large, noisy plane slipped into another six on a smaller, even noisier one and, despite the sensation of the new experiences and places, thirteen of Andrew’s fourteen