Island of Doom: Hunchback Assignments 4 (The Hunchback Assignments)

Also by Arthur Slade

OTHER BOOKS
IN THE HUNCHBACK ASSIGNMENTS SERIES

The Hunchback Assignments
The Dark Deeps: The Hunchback Assignments 2
Empire of Ruins: The Hunchback Assignments 3

Jolted: Newton Starker’s Rules for Survival
Megiddo’s Shadow
Dust
Tribes

F
OR
T
ORI AND
T
ANAYA
,
with all my love

W
ILLIAM
“M
AD
D
OG
” M
IDDLETON
faced the gallows rope with a jaundiced eye. He’d lived thirty-six years, the last five in Sumpter, Oregon, during the dregs of a dying gold rush. In a fit of cold anger he’d murdered three prospectors for their meager findings, and now he was about to hang. It was that simple. He’d never been maudlin and felt only a slight annoyance as he stared back at the gathered crowd: faces he recognized from the saloons, from brawls, all eager to watch him swing. Life had been harsh. He had been harsh. He was happy to go.

His heart didn’t skip a beat when the hangman placed the rope around his neck. “Get it done” was all he said, his last words. The trapdoor opened, and one minute later a doctor pronounced Middleton dead. The law had been upheld along with his neck.

Middleton’s journey didn’t end there. The sheriff, who was also the coroner, barked at the gravediggers, “Take him up to Stoney Cemetery and throw him in a hole!” They placed his large body in a wagon and drew it to an unmarked grave in the half-frozen ground outside Sumpter. It was shallow because of the frost and stones. There was no one to mourn him. The men who threw the dirt did their job quickly and left before nightfall. There were other new graves. Some Chinese laborers who had died of consumption, and the miners whom Middleton had shot. He lay only yards away from his victims.

A full moon appeared in the sky, the type William had preferred when he hunted deer. Three men arrived. They were small, wiry, and dressed in black, faces covered by balaclavas. They unearthed Middleton’s body, placed it in a coffin, covered it with ice, and adjusted several dials on the lid. They were professional resurrection men from the Far East, the finest at their job.

The body was transported by cart to a train and settled beside the first-class baggage, the closest Middleton had ever come to riding in luxury. At the coast, he was loaded onto a midsized paddle steamer alongside several other coffins from America and Canada. There had been three other hangings in the Rockies. One coffin contained the recipient of a bullet—a common cause of death on the frontier. There were stakes to be claimed, cattle to be rounded up, and land to be purchased, all of which often led to arguments that ended in gunfire.

William wouldn’t know it, but his coffin was next to the
body of a magistrate and sometime novelist named Duncan McTavish. He’d been locally famous for his wit, his loquacity, and his love of money. He’d poisoned his wife to inherit her fortune and instead had been hanged. If he and Middleton had both been alive at the same time, they wouldn’t have been able to find much to converse about. Since they were dead, this presented no problem.

The steamship was named
Triton II
, and it navigated the Pacific without the flag of any nation, the caskets rattling in its hold. Most smaller ships would hug the shore for safety as they traveled, but this one ran on compressed coal and an engine that would be the envy of the Royal Navy. It sped directly west, cutting through the waves.

Two evenings later the vessel arrived at an island and was met by armed patrol ships. Messages were relayed by lantern, and the ship was guided into a port as large as any in London. The eyes of the resurrection men widened, for in the center of the island was a fortress of glass. The moon painted it a glowing yellow. They knew that inside that palace was the man they referred to as the dragon master. This man was a visionary, renowned for the magnificence of his ideas and philosophies—philosophies that the resurrectionists happened to agree with. And as it turned out, the dragon master paid rather well.

It was the middle of the night, but gas and electric lamps lit the work of the soldiers building barricades. Others were hauling wagons of dirt from excavations. Several gray-clad soldiers helped the resurrection men unload the caskets and carry them to a cave a short distance away. The
resurrectionists returned to their ship and the search for more flesh. And there on the cool stones lay William “Mad Dog” Middleton’s coffin, his body as dead as ever.

Shortly thereafter, four men in white coats came out and lifted each coffin. Middleton’s was brought into the cave and set beside a worktable littered with flasks, surgery tools, and electrical cables. One of the assistants awakened an old man dozing on a cot in the corner.

“Your supplies have been delivered, Dr. Hyde, sir,” the assistant said.

The doctor nodded, shook the sleep out of his balding head, fumbled to put on his glasses, and approached the coffins. The first one he opened was William Middleton’s. When he saw the size and the condition of the corpse, he smiled.

He began his work immediately.

A
courier in a gray bowler hat and a frock coat approached a tall brick house on the outskirts of Montreal, Quebec, unaware of the professionally trained eyes watching him from a bedroom window. He was measured, weighed, and classified in the space of a few heartbeats.

“Five feet six inches,” Modo whispered. “One hundred and forty pounds. Twenty-five to twenty-seven years old.” He was alone in the room and had reverted to his childhood habit of talking to himself. “Slight limp indicates hip difficulty, perhaps from poliomyelitis.” Modo’s years of espionage training made the measuring of the man a rather easy task. It would be even simpler to jump down from his second-story window and dispatch the courier with a blow or a sleeper hold. Now, that would make him wet his britches!