The Grey Man (28 page)

It seemed the police bought the story that IJM had stumbled onto the trafficker, Rong, and the girls, and they were prepared to come along to make the bust. After the meeting Tony and I got into the tuk tuk with Cousin, and told him to take us to the school where Rong had supposedly stashed the kids. I would have preferred to deal directly with the police but The Grey Man was in the ugly boat.

On the way I called Ron to make sure all was good to go. According to the plan, Luk was going to follow us and, when we linked up with the trafficker, he would fall in behind Rong. I wasn't happy about this – even less so when I saw that Luk hadn't changed out of his flashy clothes and was also riding what appeared to be the newest motorcycle I'd seen in Phnom Penh.

I asked Ron if the cops were in position and he said, no, they were having lunch. Bloody hell, I thought, what next?

Cousin kept glancing in the rear-view mirror of his tuk tuk as he dodged in and out of the Phnom Penh traffic. ‘What's wrong, Cousin?' I asked.

‘I very worried.'

‘Why?'

‘I think someone following us.'

I looked back over my shoulder and breathed a curse. It was Luk. Not only was he in his trendy clothes and on his conspicuous bike, he was also right up our bum. ‘I don't see anyone,' I lied.

Cousin persisted. ‘I think he FBI. Please don't get me in trouble, please don't get me in trouble. I no want to go to gaol.'

I could have throttled Luk. Cousin said he wanted to drop us somewhere where he could get us another driver. I don't know where he got the reference to the FBI from – perhaps he recognised Luk as an IJM operative and knew they were an American organisation, or perhaps the FBI had been investigating American paedophiles in the past. Either way, Cousin had picked up our tail and wanted out. He was severely rattled.

‘Okay, find us somewhere for lunch,' I said. I texted Luk and told him to back off as he'd already almost burned the operation.

Cousin pulled over at a café with tables outside and I called Rong. ‘We've stopped for some lunch. We'll be one hour late. Also, we have to find a new tuk tuk driver – Cousin is sick.'

I could tell Rong was barely containing his anger. He said the girls were in the school but that he couldn't keep them there long unless someone became suspicious. I could tell he, too, was getting nervy. ‘I going to move girls to different school.'

Shit, I thought. We flagged down another tuk tuk driver. ‘What are the directions?' I asked Rong.

‘Give phone to your new driver, I tell him. Afterwards, you not use phone, okay? ‘

I passed my phone to our new driver, who spoke to Rong in rapid Khmer. His English was terrible, though, and after Rong had hung up I was unable to get a clear answer on where the new school was. I figured Rong didn't want us making calls in case we were giving directions to the cops and that he'd asked the tuk tuk driver to alert him if we used our phones.

We dragged lunch out as long as we could and then got in the tuk tuk with the new driver. Because the driver was watching us in his rear view mirror, I placed my mobile on my lap and secretly called Ron, then started a rolling monologue with Tony describing the new route we were taking. On a positive note, I couldn't see Luk, but if he'd lost us then hopefully Ron could track us by my descriptions. ‘Hey, Tony,' I said, ‘I'm glad we're finally going to meet these kids, even if the location has changed. Wow, that's a big Lexus dealership on the corner there, opposite that multi-storey office block with the Konica sign.'

‘Right, got it . . . understood,' I could hear Ron saying from the phone on my lap. Ron was in a car somewhere further back than Luk and was presumably relaying my directions to the police, who had also now finished lunch. To give credit where it's due, the Cambodian police turned out to be great. There were six of them in an airless van and they were all in uniform. They were out there in 40-degree heat for six hours and they never once complained. The colonel in charge was extremely motivated and we hope to work with him in the future.

After twenty minutes or so of driving in traffic, we pulled up at the gates of a school. There was a van sitting out the front and I saw Rong about fifty metres away standing on his own near the wall of the school. Tony and I got out of the tuk tuk and started walking towards him. He shooed us away. ‘No, no! Don't come near me.' The canny pimp was well aware of the risks of being caught with us and the kids. ‘Go look at girls – not come here.' He pointed to the school gate and then promptly headed away from the school.

I could see a clutch of eight girls who were dressed in matching uniforms. There were no other children in the yard, so I assumed the bona fide students were all in class. I wondered how a teacher could have ignored the presence of the eight stray minors. The girls approached us and we could see that they were all between ten and twelve years old, as Rong had promised. Just in case Rong was watching, I feigned dumb and moved away from them as if I didn't know who they were. I did, however, take a photo of three of the girls with my phone.

I called Rong's mobile. ‘Which kids are they?' I called to Rong. ‘They all look alike. Come and show us.'

He ignored my question. ‘Who that man and why he following you?' he asked.

‘What man?' I said.

‘Man in blue shirt,' he replied.

‘You're crazy. No one was following us,' I said, but I knew already it was Luk. I nodded to Tony, who called Ron.

‘For fuck's sake, pull Luk out. He's compromised us,' Tony said.

Rong was getting feral now and it was a really stressful situation. To top it all off Tony started to feel woozy. It was a stinking hot day – it gets well up into the forties in Cambodia before the rains come – and although we'd been chugging back the water over lunch I was worried Tony was about to come down with heat exhaustion. He's a tough guy, but the combination of the heat, adrenaline and what turned out to be food poisoning came together at the most inopportune time.

Rong was so spooked he told me to go to the hotel alone, and said that he would meet me there. We were staying at Raffles courtesy of Channel Seven, so the situation was a bit messy. I tried to convince the lead girl to come with me and even got the tuk tuk driver to translate. She said an emphatic no; Rong had evidently impressed on her she must stay at the school, no matter what happened. Unfortunately, just then hundreds of kids spilled out of the classrooms on a break of some sort. Other children came out to play. The lead girl ran off with two of the others and lost herself in the crowd.

I called Ron and told him that we'd probably been burned and that Rong now wanted to meet with me alone. Ron said the police had to pull out because the arrest warrant was due to expire at 5 pm. It was now four thirty. I hated the thought of the operation falling over, even though I was sure Rong was seriously spooked and we would probably never see those eight little girls again. ‘Can you get them to extend? I'll try and get Rong back onside.'

‘I'll try, but I don't think they will. They're already heading back to the station,' Ron said.

Paul Waterhouse rang me and I told him about the situation. Paul said, ‘The colonel told me not to worry if we had to extend the warrant, he could do it. The colonel seriously wants to catch this guy.'

Ron had told me that IJM had another operation planned that night, for the benefit of the Channel Seven TV crew. They were going to raid and shut down a brothel, in true IJM door-kicking fashion. Great, I thought – we wouldn't want the rescue of eight little girls to get in the way of a round-up of working girls who were probably all legal age.

Tony decided to head back to the hotel as he'd started to dry retch. We went back part of the way together, then Tony transferred to another tuk tuk and I arrived outside Raffles alone. I called Rong and told him I was ready to meet him.

‘No. You get in tuk tuk and then give phone to driver. I tell him new place to meet.'

It may have been the heat taking its toll on me, or a combination of everything that had gone wrong, but I lost it with Rong. ‘I've had enough! You've screwed us around too much. All we wanted was to have a party with some girls and you've just conned us and taken our five hundred bucks.'

‘No, is you who have messed me around,' Rong said. ‘You no call me thief. I have done this plenty times and have never had problem. I always deliver.'

I hung up on Rong, the principled pimp, and went into Raffles and up to my room. It was an oasis of air conditioning and comfort. I had a cold shower and lay down on top of the bed.

I felt deflated, but I couldn't let it end like this. I called Rong and told him I was sorry, that I was hot and tired, and hadn't meant what I said. ‘Forget about the other guys – can you just get me one girl for myself? ‘

Rong told me one girl would cost US$800. I had a couple of grand in my bag and I was hoping that if I met up with him I might be able to get a lead on all the girls again, or at least get one girl out and hand her over to the authorities – illegally if need be.

It was crazy, but I was heading out alone again, just as I had at the beginning of The Grey Man. Rong told me to meet him at the Phnom Penh Hotel. When I got to the hotel, it was twilight. He called me again and told me to walk out the back into the car park and then to the nearby Dubai Phnom Penh mosque. Not knowing much about Cambodia's history, I was surprised to find a mosque in Phnom Penh. It was obvious that Rong was watching me to see if I was being tailed. I wasn't, but as he led me on a merry dance around the backstreets of Phnom Penh I had time to think through what I was doing.

Here I was, in a country where we had no relationship with the local police and where the NGO we were supposed to be operating with had turned its back on us. Although I always insisted our volunteers work in pairs, to watch each other's back, I was on my own, with no support and no backup. If I did get a girl I might very well be busted as a paedophile and sent to gaol. Rong knew something was, well, wrong, and for all I knew he was setting me up for an ambush – and I had almost US$1600 in my bag.

I was hot and I was tired, and I was sick of it. Despite Rong's directions I couldn't find him in the grounds of the mosque, so I rang him and told him I was leaving and I wasn't playing any more games. I hung up. He called me back. He said he was just near the fence on the left-hand side of the mosque.

I decided to give it one more shot. I came back in, walked past the left side of the mosque and there he was, shirtless, on the other side of the cement wall that separated the mosque from its neighbours. It was just on dark and I almost didn't see him. I looked at the house behind him and could see none of the girls.

Rong said to me, ‘No talking, just give me the money.'

That was it for me. ‘I've had a gutful of you, mate. You've dragged me around this city all day. You're an arsehole and you stole our money. Fuck off.'

I turned my back on him and headed for the gates of the mosque. My phone rang but I ignored it. Once I was out on the main drag in front of the Phnom Penh Hotel I got in a tuk tuk and headed home.

I felt for the girls but I had run out of options. I had no police backup and even if I got my hands on the girls and took them to the police they had been well trained by Rong: they would simply say they were on a school outing, and I would be a kidnapper. They were only supposed to be gone overnight so I figured Rong would simply return them to the same uncaring, callous parents who had loaned them out in the first place.

I looked at my phone and there was a message from Rong asking me to come back. I tapped out a text message to him:
Fuck off, you're a dickhead.

Back at the hotel I dropped in on Tony. He was marginally better and I debriefed with him then went to bed. I didn't sleep well that night. I saw our Grey Man team the next day and explained what went down. They had been following us all day as backup for the police, as I wanted them on hand if the cops screwed up. They all took it well despite the fact they had been given the run-around.

The next morning I met up with Paul over breakfast and he told me the IJM raid had achieved nothing. When they arrived the place was empty.

I decided to try another rescue option and thought we could replicate Tony's original success in Cambodia by having an underage girl brought to a hotel. I found a moto driver and told him what I was looking for. He took me to the main
wat
in Phnom Penh and showed me some girls, but none of them looked young enough. Next, he took me to a scummy area that I had been through before at night with two Grey Man teams for protection. I later found out it was the most dangerous street in Phnom Penh.

We talked to a pimp and then drove down the road to a closed shopfront that was out of the way. A few minutes later the pimp arrived on a moto with a girl on the back. She was only fourteen. They wanted eighty US dollars for an hour with her. I pretended that I wasn't sure if she was what I wanted and told him I would have to think about it. I needed time to try to get IJM onside again and organise the police.

I returned to the hotel and spoke to Paul on the phone, outlining my plan, and he phoned Ron Dunne to tell him about the fourteen-year-old. A couple of minutes later Paul called me back and told me that Ron was pissed off and that the film crew was not to do anything in relation to the girl I'd found. Paul had had enough too, and he said that Channel Seven was pulling the plug on any further operations anyway. I wasn't concerned that the media crew was leaving, as it was one less hassle for me, but I did feel sorry for them that everything had gone pear-shaped after they had spent a lot of cash to get here.

Ron called again. ‘You guys are operating illegally and you have to stop or you'll be arrested,' he told me.

‘Fine,' I said. I hung up.

Tony and I found Cousin again and convinced him to take a team to Rong's house in the countryside, about forty-five minutes out of Phnom Penh. They did some covert surveillance, took photos and produced a map. Once they returned, I wrote up a brief on Rong and the girls and had it translated into Khmer. I passed it on to three of the major anti-trafficking NGOs in Cambodia other than IJM. As far as I know, nothing ever came of us supplying that information.