The Sinister Pig - 15

THE SINISTER PIG

ALSO BY TONY HILLERMAN

Fiction

The Wailing Wind

Hunting Badger

The First Eagle

The Fallen Man

Finding Moon

Sacred Clowns

Coyote Waits

Talking God

A Thief of Time

Skinwalkers

The Ghostway

The Dark Wind

People of Darkness

Listening Woman

Dance Hall of the Dead

The Fly on the Wall

The Blessing Way

The Boy Who Made Dragonfly(for children)

Nonfiction

Seldom Disappointed

Hillerman Country

The Great Taos Bank Robbery

Rio Grande

New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico

Indian Country

THE SINISTER PIG

TONY HILLERMAN

HarperCollinsPublishers

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE SINISTER PIG.Copyright © 2003 by Tony Hillerman. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

FIRST EDITION

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 0-06-019443-X

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.5

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EPILOGUE.83

About the e-Book.85

A huge thanks goes to Maryanne Noonan, a veteran of the U.S. Customs Service, for her help relative to the efforts of our undermanned and overworked Border Patrol to stem the flood across our borders, and to Marty Nelson (my unpaid research specialist in Denver) for keeping me abreast of the Department of the Interior’s efforts to explain what has happened to $176,000,000 (billions!!!) of Indian oil, gas, coal, timber, etc—royalties which it can’t seem to account for. Henry Schepers, an old friend and veteran pipeliner, also provided valuable aid on the laundering and trapping of pigs and other mysteries of that underground industry.

—Tony Hillerman

THE SINISTER PIG

David Slate reached across the tiny table in Bistro Bis and handed an envelope to the graying man with the stiff burr haircut.

“You are now Carl Mankin,” Slate said. “You are newly retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. You are currently employed as a consultant for Seamless Weld. Along with your new credit card, Carl, that envelope holds a lot of authentic-looking stuff from Seamless. Business cards, expense account forms—that sort of material. But the credit card should cover any expenses.”

“Carl Mankin,” the burr-haired man said, inspecting the card. “And a Visa card. ‘Carl Mankin’ should be easy to remember. And by next Tuesday, I actually will be newly retired from the CIA.” He was older than middle age, well past sixty, but trim, sunburned, and young [2] looking. He sorted through the papers from the envelope and smiled at Slate. “However, I don’t seem to find a contract in here,” he said.

Slate laughed. “And I’ll bet you didn’t expect to find one, either. The senator works on the old-fashioned ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ contract. You know, ‘Your word’s as good as your bond.’ That sounds odd here in Washington these days, but some of the old-timers still like to pretend there is honor alive among the political thieves.”

“Remind me of what that word is, then,” the new Carl Mankin said. “As I remember it, you buy my time for thirty days, or until the job isdone. Or failing that, I tell you it can’t be done. And the pay is fifty thousand dollars, either way it works out.”

“And expenses,” Slate said. “But the credit card should cover that unless you’re paying somebody to tell you something.” He chuckled. “Somebody who doesn’t accept a Visa card.”

Carl Mankin put everything back into the envelope, and the envelope on the table beside his salad plate. “Who actually pays the credit card bill? I noticed my Carl Mankin address is in El Paso, Texas.”

“That’s the office of Seamless Weld,” Slate said. “The outfit you’re working for.”

“The senator owns it? That doesn’t sound likely.”

“It isn’t likely. It’s one of the many subsidiaries of Searigs Corporation, and that, so I understand, is partly owned and totally controlled by A.G.H. Industries.”

“Searigs? That’s the outfit that built the offshore-drilling platforms for Nigeria,” said Carl Mankin. “Right?”

“And in the North Sea,” Slate said. “For the Norwegians. Or was it the Swedish?”

[3] “Owned by the senator?”

“Of course not. Searigs is part of A.G.H. Industries. What are you getting at, anyway?”

“I am trying to get at who I am actually working for.”

Slate sipped his orange juice, grinned at Carl Mankin, said: “You surely don’t think anyone would have told me that, do you?”

“I think you could guess. You’re the senator’s chief administrative aide, his picker of witnesses for the committees he runs, his doer of undignified deeds, his maker of deals with the various lobbyists—” Mankin laughed. “And need I say it, his finder of other guys like me to run the senator’s errands with somebody else paying the fee. So I surely do think you could make an accurate guess. But would you tell me if you did?”

Slate smiled. “Probably not. And I am almost certain you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“In which case, I should probably make sure to get my pay in advance.”

Slate nodded. “Exactly. When we finish lunch, and you pay for it with your new Visa card, we’ll go down to the bank I use. We transfer forty-nine thousand five hundred dollars into Carl Mankin’s account there, and I present you the deposit slip.”

“And the other five hundred?”

Slate got out his wallet, extracted a deposit slip, and handed it to Carl Mankin. It showed a Carl Mankin account opened the previous day with a five-hundred-dollar deposit. Mankin put it in his shirt pocket, then took it out and laid it on the table.

“An account opened for an imaginary man without his signature. I didn’t know that could be done.”

[4] Slate laughed. “It’s easy if the proper vice president calls down from upstairs and says do it.”

“We need to be clear about this,” Mankin said. “You want me to go out to that big Four Corners oil patch in New Mexico, look it over, see if I can find out how the pipeline system out there was used—and maybe still is being used—to bypass paying royalty money into the Interior Department’s trust fund for the Indians. Does that about summarize the job?”

Slate nodded.

“That’s a big part of it. The most important information of all is the names of those switching the stuff around so the money for it goes into the right pockets. And who owns the pockets.”

“And the senator understands that this is likely to produce nothing. I presume it is one of a whole bunch of ways he’s looking for some way to pin the blame, or the corruption, on somebody for that four- or five-billion-dollar loss of royalty money from the Tribal Trust Funds. The one the
Washington Post
has been writing about for the past month. The one the Secretary of Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs honchos are in trouble over.”

Slate was grinning again. “Was that intended as a question? What do the press secretaries say to questions like that?” He slipped into a serious, disapproving expression. “We never comment on speculation.”

“The newspapers say that this ripping off the four billion or so of Tribal royalty money has been going on for more than fifty years. And they’re quoting the government bean counters. Right? I can’t see much hope of me finding anything new.”

“It’s not a mere four billion dollars,” Slate said. “The [5] Government Accounting Office estimated the amount not accounted for may be as high as forty billion. And the law firm for the tribes is now claiming the U.S. gov has stacked up a debt of a hundred and thirty-seven billion bucks on royalties dating back to 1887. I guess what the senator wants to know is if the stealing persists.”

“And he bets somebody’s fifty grand that I’ll be lucky enough to find out.”

“His friends in the State Department tell him you did a great job finding out how Iraqi oil people switched pipelines to avoid those United Nations’ sanctions on exporting their oil. I guess he just wants you to do it again.”

“It’s a very different story out there,” Carl Mankin said. “In the Middle East oil patch you had a small bunch of greasy old pipeline experts surrounded by various groups of Arabs. The Arabs weren’t really members of the Brit-American petroleum club. Which I was. Everybody knew everybody’s business. After twenty years in and out of there, I was just another one of them. People talked to me. I got sneaked into pipeline switching stations, got to see pressure gauges—all the technical stuff. Out in New Mexico, I’ll just be a damned nosey stranger.”

Slate was studying him. He grinned. “In New Mexico, you’ll be Carl Mankin. Right? All this making apologies in advance for not finding anything useful means you’re signing on?”

“Oh, sure. I guess so,” he said. He folded the deposit slip into his wallet, took out the Carl Mankin Visa card, signaled to the waiter, and then handed the card to him when the waiter came to the table.

“A symbolic action,” Slate said, and laughed.

[6] “One more thought I want to pass along,” he said. “What little chance I have out there of picking up any useful information would be multiplied many times over if I had a clearer idea, a more specific idea, of what he wants.”

“Just the truth,” Slate said. “Nothing but the truth.”

“Yeah,” Carl Mankin said. “But I’m entertaining all kinds of thoughts. For example, why connect me directly with this Texas construction outfit? Seamless Weld. Sounds like something in the pipelining business. Does the senator own it?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” said Slate. “It will be owned by some corporation that is part of a conglomerate in which the senator has a substantial interest. If he actually owned Seamless Weld on any public record, he’d be way too sly to get it involved.”

They were on the sidewalk now, hailing a cab, a warm breeze moving dust along the street, the smell of rain in the air.

“So why stick me with that company? And don’t tell me it’s to make my expenses tax deductible. What’s the reason?”

A cab stopped for them. Slate opened the door, ushered Mankin in, seated himself, gave the driver the bank’s address, settled back, arid said: “Looks like rain.”

“I’m waiting for an answer,” Mankin said. “And it’s not just out of curiosity. “I’m going to be asking a lot of questions, and that means I’ll have to answer a lot of them myself. I can’t afford to be caught lying.”

“OK,” Slate said. He took a little silver cigarette box out of his coat pocket, opened it, offered one to Mankin, took one himself, looked at it, put it back in the box, and said: “Well, I guess you know that everyone in this town [7]has at least two agendas. The public one, and their own personal causes. Right?”