The Grey Man (20 page)

Misao was standing across the road with her hands to her face. She looked like that famous Edvard Munch painting
The Scream.
‘Why did you do that?' was the first thing she asked. ‘You could have been killed. What would I have done without you?'

I realised it had been stupid and that if anything had happened to me she would have been left alone in a foreign country to sort out the mess. But I also knew exactly why I had done it. I was in my element and I felt alive, just as I had when I was rescuing kids. This was what I was born for.

Misao asked me to promise I would never do something like that again. I promised, but I knew that even though I was unlikely to get involved in another bar fight, it would not be the last time I took a risk.

Before Misao and I got married I'd moved out of my unit and lived with friends for a while. I rented out the unit, which helped me pay off the mortgage and cover the body corporate fees, which were quite high. When I made my final decision to go back to Thailand for an extended trip I sold the unit. I made a profit of about $40,000, which allowed me to pay off my outstanding bank loans. That left about $20,000 for us to live on in Thailand.

It's one thing to live as an expat worker in Thailand, with a good income in foreign currency, but a very different situation if you're trying to live on a limited source of funds. Still, $20,000 was a lot of money to me and when we got to Chiang Mai I was able to find us a pretty nice place, a condo in a development, on Huai Kaeo Road. Our studio apartment was on the fifteenth floor and there was a swimming pool on the roof. It cost us about A$480 a month to rent. I thought we might stay for five months, but Misao and I compromised and decided to give it three months and see how we liked living there, so I also negotiated a three-month rental on a motorcycle.

Even though I'd moved closer to where our operations were happening I was still tied to the computer. I was now in the same time zone as our Thai people but I was still up at odd hours on Skype with Russell back in Australia or dealing with emails from Robyn (Robbie) Magers who was temporarily handling our admin back in Australia. A typical day for me involved an early start on the computer. I'd spend about four hours clearing emails and then meet up with Panom and the Major to get a progress report from them and discuss new leads. We'd sometimes go out to lunch and Misao would come with us. As with my earlier trips I tried as hard as I could to live like a local and immerse myself in Thai food, culture and language.

Before we left Australia I'd told Misao that I would spend only a few days a week on Grey Man business, as I expected it would be easier for me to sort things out if I was in-country. I was wrong. It seemed the more time I spent with Panom and the Major face to face the more follow-up work each meeting generated. Misao wanted me to spend more time with her. I'd promised her that we'd have free days to go exploring, but that wasn't happening.

Occasionally I was able to snatch a day off, to visit the elephant park or a temple, and I enjoyed that free time as much as she did. One day I took Misao to a shooting range where she was able to fire a selection of pistols as well as AK-47 and M16 assault rifles. She loved that, as it allowed her to blow off a bit of steam that might otherwise have been directed at me. On another occasion I took her up to the hill tribe villages to show her the work we'd been doing up there. As always, staying at the bamboo trekking lodge that had been built with seed money from The Grey Man was a calming, almost magical experience. I loved lying on the mattress on the floor with my wife next to me. During the night there was an odd
tok-ay, tok-ay
noise which fascinated both of us. The next morning Sila explained that the noise came from large lizards – called, not surprisingly, tokays – that lived in the rafters.

The Songkran water festival in April 2009 was another chance for us to have some fun and let loose a bit. It's a crazy time of year in Chiang Mai when the entire population has licence to shoot and bombard one another – with water. We bought a pump-action water pistol with a backpack tank and each morning of the festival Misao would lock and load and get on the back of the motorcycle. I'd rev the little machine into life and we'd shoot up the ramp of the underground car park humming our theme tune from
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Once outside we'd cruise the streets of Chiang Mai looking for unsuspecting tourists and locals for Misao to blast with the water gun. I'd call out targets to her and Misao would gun them down, but it wasn't a one-sided affair. One day we got stuck in traffic behind a flatbed truck crowded with young guys and girls who were standing in the back around a big barrel of ice-cold water. With traffic hemming us in, we were sitting ducks. They dipped their buckets in and then drenched us.

Despite the breaks I knew that life in this strange country was hard on Misao. She didn't know anyone and when I suggested she get out and do some classes or try to socialise with people I could see her heart wasn't in it, though she did do some calligraphy classes for a while. While I sometimes took her out with me and to meetings with Panom and the Major, there was so much of the work she couldn't be involved in.

However, Misao was such a great support to me. Some nights I would just collapse on the bed. I was constantly tired and pissed off and Misao would listen to my complaints, sadness and anger, and just be there for me. She loved me and I loved her more every day. All the struggles in Thailand were bringing us closer together.

We did have two big fights while we were there, but our only escape from each other in the studio apartment was to go out onto the verandah. Each time we did we were eaten alive by mosquitoes, and it was damn hot, forcing us to come back inside into the air conditioning and sort it out. Russell and his wife Virginia came to visit for two weeks and were staying across the hall from us. They commented that they didn't see how we could have lived in that small apartment for three months without killing each other. I guess we were just right for each other.

Nothing was ever easy in Thailand, though. We'd get a lead on an underage girl, or a paedophile, but then there was always some reason why we couldn't act on it straightaway. It was frustrating. I'd thought that by being on the scene I could make things happen faster, to my timetable. I'd misjudged Panom and the Major, and I'd misjudged Asia. The simplest of requests would take days to be resolved. When I talked to Panom about future operations it seemed all the discussions we'd had via email had gone in one ear and out the other. Instead of concentrating on rescuing kids, he would come up with proposals to raid and shut down brothels staffed by adult women, as though he was still working for IJM.

I spoke to my ex-girlfriend Fon, who was then still working at Empower, and asked her if she was getting any leads on underage kids in the sex industry. She was visiting brothels, educating the girls about AIDS and other health issues and distributing condoms, but she told us she'd seen no underage girls lately. In fact, none of our sources was turning up much. It seemed that the problem of underage prostitution had gone so far underground it was impossible to find kids to rescue anymore.

As I've mentioned, I hadn't set up The Grey Man as a vigilante organisation to track down paedophiles, although from time to time in the past we'd been called on by the Thai police to help track down western expats and sex tourists who were abusing kids. Now, Panom and the Major had new information on some suspects. There were innocent kids in Chiang Mai who might not have been trafficked or sold, but they were still being abused. There was work to do.

In early 2009, Panom and the Major told Misao and me over lunch that four girls in their early teens claimed to have been molested by two men – one white, the other Thai – at an orphanage in Chiang Mai. A local schoolteacher had contacted the police when she'd noticed the girls from the orphanage were acting strangely. They'd become difficult to deal with, couldn't concentrate or apply themselves to their work, and they were reluctant to return to the shelter at the end of the school day. The teacher spoke to the girls and uncovered the allegations of sexual abuse.

‘The police need our help to get close to the main guy,' Panom said in between mouthfuls of
khao soi
, a noodle dish popular in northern Thailand.

‘Are you sure that we'll get a result from this?' I asked the Major. It was difficult to get a conviction in paedophile prosecutions because often they would buy their way out of a case. It was also difficult to get sworn evidence from the victims, which would be necessary to organise a warrant.

‘Yes, I am sure. We have videotape of the girls giving their evidence,' the Major said.

I didn't share the Major's enthusiasm for the case, but I asked Robbie back in Australia to do some research on the American guy who owned the orphanage; I can't mention his real name so I'll call him Harris. The other suspect was the Thai manager of the institution. The key finding in the report that came back was that Harris was well connected. He'd been in Chiang Mai for many years and had lived in Asia most of his life, which meant that he probably had a web of contacts in the government and the police.

According to the Major an investigation had begun, but had later been shelved. It wasn't clear what had happened, or who, if anyone, had been paid off. If a bribe hadn't changed hands it was possible that the arresting police had backed off simply because they didn't want to take the risk of prosecuting such a high-profile westerner with strong contacts.

I gave the go-ahead to start a Grey Man investigation of Harris and his associates. In the time since the case had been opened, it turned out that Harris had kicked out of the orphanage the girls who had testified against him. The teacher who had sounded the alarm had overseen the repatriation of the girls back to their home villages. No matter how bad their home lives were, they couldn't be any worse off than they had been under Harris's care.

I asked the Major if the fact that the girls were no longer in Chiang Mai would weaken the case against Harris. He maintained that since the police had their sworn affidavits and video evidence the case would be watertight. If it was that strong, I wondered why the original police had backed away from it. Money, I guessed, answering my own question.

To get the case moving again the police needed as much information as they could get on Harris and his operations. Harris was a Christian evangelist who had grown up speaking a number of different languages as his missionary parents moved from country to country spreading the word of the Lord. These days he was known as a bit of recluse and lived in a house in a walled compound that also held one of two orphanages he ran. The original investigating police had been denied access to Harris's personal lair. The Major and the new crew of officers on the case thought that if I could gain Harris's trust, and maybe an invitation to meet him in his sanctuary, then I might be able to sneak in a couple of Thai cops who could serve a warrant on him and get the ball rolling again. The Grey Man would be helping out with transport and logistics – hiring vehicles and actually getting the police to the target. This was typical of so many operations we'd been involved in. Sometimes it was the little things, like organising a van and a car, which we did in this case, that galvanised the cops into action. I could never quite figure out why the cops couldn't just issue a warrant and do it themselves. Maybe they needed our cash, or maybe they had us there as the fall guy if things went wrong.

Misao had been in on the briefings since the beginning and when I told her I was going undercover to try to make contact with Harris she asked if she could come along. My initial reaction was to tell her she would be better off staying in the condo, but I wanted to share these experiences with her. I didn't see what I did as particularly dangerous – unlike our operatives who'd been involved in the bust of the Laotian people traffickers, I'd never carried a weapon on operations in Thailand and I'd never felt the need to – although there was an element of risk and you didn't like to think about what might happen if your cover was blown and there was no backup close at hand. I weighed up the risks and we decided that she would accompany me.