The Grey Man (18 page)

It had all the makings of that elusive fairytale ending that I thought we'd never see in this business. With the help of the social worker from the New Life Center we went through the laborious process of enrolling her in school. Peng's mother was over the moon and we took lots of photos of us all with Peng and her mother both smiling. All seemed to be going well, but when Peng turned sixteen she ran away from home and school with her new boyfriend.

There are no Hollywood endings.

NINE

A Japanese Girl and a Pivotal Radio Interview

By 2007 my personal life was a mess. I was working my day job for the public service five days a week and staying up until the small hours every night doing emails and trying to run a charity that operated thousands of kilometres away.

My fitness had gone out the window. I'd had to give up my martial arts training and I was living on a diet of TV dinners. My relationship with Fon had ended amicably when I first returned from Thailand and I'd had no time for romance in Australia.

I decided I needed a girlfriend. I'm a very mission-focused person, thanks to my military training and the experience I've had running The Grey Man, so I decided to attack the target of love in the same no-nonsense manner. I set aside some time to check out an internet dating site and found no shortage of women in my age bracket. I assessed them and messaged them, telling them that I didn't have time to beat about the bush, to-ing and fro-ing with emails, and that if they were remotely interested in me then I thought the best course of action would be for us to meet up for a cup of coffee and see how things went from there. In the first week after I logged on, I arranged to meet fifteen women – nine of them in the course of a single weekend, and the rest after work. Most of them were quite pleasant, although one talked incessantly about herself and then wanted to know what I thought of her.

I almost hadn't added Misao to my list. She was Japanese and I thought she looked quite cute, but she'd written very little about herself on her profile. She said she loved living in Brisbane, and liked going to the coast, to Surfers Paradise, and boogie boarding. As I filtered out the other possibles I kept going back to Misao's picture and her few words. ‘Nope,' I'd say to myself, then move on to another listing. I went back probably six or more times before I finally sent her an electronic ‘kiss' to show her I was interested. She agreed to meet me and she was date number seven on my list of fifteen (although I hadn't arranged to meet them in any order of priority).

We arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Brisbane. It was just after Christmas and I know it sounds corny, but as soon as I met her I knew there was something special about her. Misao had the greatest spirit – there's no other way I can describe it – of all the girls I'd met so far on my high-speed-dating campaign.

We chatted for what seemed like ages and when I checked my watch I saw that the relatively short time I'd allocated to her was nearly up. ‘I'm sorry, I have to go.'

‘But you've bought me a coffee and I want to talk to you some more. Stay, and I'll buy you a coffee,' she said.

I felt terrible, but I told her I had to leave.

‘Where do you have to go in such a hurry?' she asked.

‘I have to take my mother shopping.' As soon as I said the words, I knew the lie sounded incredibly lame. She'd either think I wasn't interested in her or that I was a mummy's boy. The truth was, I had to go and meet girl number eight at New Farm and if I didn't move I'd be late. I'd arranged to meet the fifteen in alternate coffee shops so there would be no overlap. ‘I'm so sorry.'

I'd borrowed my friend Janette's Toyota RAV4 because my old car was such a bomb I thought it might break down between dates. When I got in the car I called another friend, Vicky, on my mobile phone.

‘How's the dating going?' she asked.

‘I think I'm going to marry this one.'

‘You're joking!' she said.

‘Of course I am,' I said, but the more I thought about Misao, while I drove to the next appointment, I knew she was the one.

I was still flat out with The Grey Man work but I called Misao soon after our coffee date and said that while I would like to see her again, it couldn't be for another two weeks. I suggested we go to a Latin dance class – something a bit different.

Misao agreed to go, but I got the feeling that she thought I wasn't really all that interested in her, or that I was playing hard to get. We emailed a few times in the intervening two weeks, but I was so busy that my messages to her were rarely more than two or three lines. She told me that her past boyfriends had all been besotted with her and had sent her voluminous emails, which she loved. It drove her crazy that I was giving out so little information, but that's who I was, and I wasn't about to change.

The dancing class, when it finally came around, was great fun and we went out for coffee afterwards, where I learned more about her. Misao was a student and Japanese language teacher who'd come to Australia because, even from an early age, she'd felt stifled in Asia and wanted to breathe again

We got on really well, but we sometimes had some communication breakdowns. I told her she was ‘damn cute' for months before she told me she wanted me to stop calling her that. She thought I was saying ‘dumb cute'. On one date I told her a funny story about something to do with a woman I'd once been out with who lived on the Gold Coast. Clearly she didn't get the joke (I can't remember what it was, so it couldn't have been that funny), and she didn't laugh. The next day I received a text message from Misao which read:
I hope you enjoyed your time with your lady friend on the Gold Coast.
It took me a while to work out what she meant, but then I realised she must have thought I'd said I was still going out with the woman on the Gold Coast. I called Misao's number but she refused to answer. I knew she'd be home so I drove around. When I got to her place I knocked on the door. ‘Misao, are you in there?'

‘Go away. Go back to your other woman.'

‘There is no other woman. Are you crazy?'

Eventually I was able to explain to her how she'd got it wrong, and she calmed down. We had a few more dramas like that. Some naïve people might think that Japanese women are somehow more subservient or placid than western women, but that's bullshit. They're high maintenance.

We drove up into the mountains for a date and Misao said she wanted to discuss something serious with me. I was a bit nervous, as I really liked her and thought things were going well. We went for a walk in the bush and sat down for a rest. Misao turned to me with a serious look on her face. ‘John . . .'

‘Yes?' I wondered what was coming next.

‘All of my boyfriends have had a nice car. I don't know how to tell you this, but your car is rubbish.'

My car had a shattered rear window and for a while I'd had some plastic taped across the hole. Even after I got the glass replaced I hadn't bothered to scrape off the duct tape that I'd used to hold the temporary window in place. This was just as well because I was out driving one night when the cops pulled me over for not having a working taillight. I explained I was having some electrical problems and a fuse had blown. The male cop looked at the car and asked if it was registered. It must have looked bad. I showed him the registration sticker. He looked at the duct tape and asked whether I had broken the rear window recently. I said yes. Luckily the duct tape covered up the rust that was eating away the metal around the window. I chatted to the female cop and told her that my girlfriend wanted me to get a new car. ‘You should listen to her,' she replied. Misao loved that story and wanted to call the policewoman to thank her. When we started looking for a house, Misao would make me park my car around the corner from whatever property we were visiting so she wouldn't be embarrassed in front of the real estate agent, and in case the vendors thought we were time-wasters with no money.

I proposed to Misao on the top floor of the Q1 building on the Gold Coast, and to my great joy she said yes, although she added that when we eventually got married I was banned from driving the car to the wedding in case it broke down and I didn't make it to the ceremony. One day a few weeks later we went to the shops and I parked my groaning, smoking, rusting old beast. We got out and had only moved a short way from it when a woman walked past. Misao overheard the woman say, ‘What a dirty car.'

‘She can't say that,' Misao said to me.

I shrugged. ‘Who cares?'

Misao's face started to redden. ‘I'm going to tell her.'

‘Tell her what?'

‘I'm going to tell her she's wrong.'

‘Forget it.' The car was a running joke between us and I couldn't work out why Misao was suddenly getting so riled up over someone pointing out the truth – that my car was a piece of junk.

‘John, this woman doesn't know you. She doesn't know that you drive that car because you spend all your money on going to Thailand to help the people there. All she sees is the car. When I first met you, I thought: there is something wrong with this strange man and his strange car, but now I know. People should not judge you by what you drive. I am proud that you use your money to help other people.'

I was so proud of her right then, and I realised how lucky I was to have met her.

I was a shy kid. As an adult, I could deliver an intelligence briefing on a military exercise, or address a crowd of people if I had to, as I'd done with Rotary clubs, but I still shied away from the limelight. If I had a vision of how The Grey Man would be perceived publicly it would be someone whispering to someone, after we'd ended an operation, ‘Who was that masked man?', à la the Lone Ranger. Okay, I know it's a romantic image, but I'd never sought public recognition for the work I'd been doing. Also, as I've mentioned, The Grey Man had made the deliberate decision to shun publicity in Thailand because we didn't need it, and because it might compromise the identities of our operatives who worked undercover.

The reality, however, was that we had a full-time employee on the ground who needed to be paid, so we needed to improve our fund-raising capacity. The emails and other administration tasks were never-ending, so I really wanted to find someone who could help us on that front as well. To justify having our man on the ground, we also wanted to expand our operations. Funnily enough, operations don't cost nearly as much as the development and preventative work we do in the villages. All our volunteers – me included – pay our own airfares and expenses. However, we did find ourselves having to give money to the Thai police to assist with their logistics.

We also needed to widen the gene pool of our operational volunteers. I was still getting a steady stream of volunteers from the military via the Special Forces grapevine. Most of these tended to be from the 1st Commando Company in Sydney, where I'd served. Just as in my days, the commando profile tended to range from criminal to cop, and everything in between.

My experience with former or serving military volunteers had been pretty hit and miss. Occasionally we'd get someone who turned out to be all right, but a lot of the guys who contacted us were adventurers who wanted to cross into Burma and seek out traffickers, or to kick in doors with all guns blazing. I was seriously worried that some of these guys might create an international incident if we let them loose on Thailand. The other problem with some former Special Forces people, surprisingly, was their unreliability. They liked the idea of being involved in an operation, but in reality very few of them had either the skills or the patience to be effective undercover operatives. They tended to be men of action, who had no tolerance for the continual frustrations of trying to find underage kids in a sea of vice.

I'd also been contacted by a couple of policemen, including some ex and serving Federal Police. I wondered, briefly, if the interest from the Feds was us being checked out as an organisation, but mostly I took these expressions of interest as genuine. Indeed, it seemed to me that police could be better suited to the sort of work we were doing. So much of the job, as I'd learned from first-hand experience, involved following leads that might result in nothing, or spending long boring hours in bars or on surveillance. There was no kicking in of doors, no gunplay, and rarely a happy ending with a big brave westerner walking out of a brothel with a grateful Asian girl in his arms.

Thanks to our minor public profile through Rotary and the fundraisers there had been a couple of small stories about The Grey Man in newspapers in Australia. One of these must have caught the attention of ABC Radio in Brisbane, because one day in January 2008 I received a call from Pam O'Brien, a producer of
The Conversation Hour
presented by Richard Fidler. She said Richard wanted to interview me. I told her I'd think about it and get back to her.

I'd heard about Richard Fidler's program and knew that he was widely respected as an interviewer, so I was fairly sure he would do a straight job and not seek to overly sensationalise what we were doing. I thought going on his program might help us to attract some suitable volunteers and bring more people to our fundraising, so I got back to the producer and agreed to have a chat. A week before the interview I met with Pam and explained to her, in some detail, what we'd been doing as an organisation, and how I'd become involved in it. Richard would understand who we were and what we were on about before the interview began, and this was different from other interviews I've done since. I was mindful, however, of protecting my identity, so for the interview I continued using a pseudonym I'd created in Thailand – John Curtis. John is similar to my real first name, and the surname comes from my childhood hero-worship of the actor Tony Curtis. My favourite movie was
The Black Shield of Falworth
, a Tony Curtis classic. I used a pseudonym because I was worried that if people in Thailand found out my real identity someone might come looking for me one day. I wasn't concerned about my safety, but I had real fears of someone targeting my daughter.