And so, gazing back through my murderer’s eyes, I could appreciate the logic of a kidnapping, because through those eyes I could see how all hope for the Rabuns of Kamenz vanished when my husband aired his tape of Holden Hurley and Samar Mansour carving their initials into the tree of history with the crooked iron spikes of a Swastika. Which was odd, actually, because those days had been so different, so magical and glorious for us. The story was picked up by the national network, and we threw a party to celebrate the launching of Bo’s career. We never considered the impact of the story on Hurley, Mansour, or the other members of The Eleven, because they represented our unseen enemy: the bully around the corner, the false prophet behind the pulpit, the subversive thought rotting the fabric of society. Like a little David, my Bo had slain the beast, and we were proud. We had no idea that at the same time we were celebrating this great victory, Samar Mansour was sealing a videocassette copy of his documentary into a padded mailing envelope with the following note:
Ott,
The truth is what we want it to be.
We may never see each other again.
Plant the seeds.
Your friend,
Sam
By Sunday morning, the FBI had arrested Hurley on multiple counts of mail and wire fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering. A nationwide manhunt for Samar Mansour ended with confirmation that he’d fled the country, probably to Yemen or Afghanistan. Ott received the videocassette in Buffalo and inserted it into the tape player in his bedroom after his mother had gone to sleep.
Sam Mansour’s documentary is actually a well-constructed and well-produced film, beginning with a grim river of historic black and white photographs appearing and disappearing on the screen: men in Nazi uniforms, the frightened faces of women and children being loaded onto train cars, electrified fences around concentration camps, prison barracks, showers, mounds of decaying corpses, smokestacks, incinerators. The images flash by faster and faster, finally trailing off to a screen of black. From this darkness, the mournful cry of an oboe emerges; it is the first sound we hear on the documentary, and it plays a dirge to accompany the slow march across the screen of hundreds of titles of books and films about the Holocaust-every title Sam Mansour could find during his research. As the last of these scroll across the screen, the oboe is swallowed by the symphonic roar of Wagner’s Die Walküre, and the sneering face of Adolph Hitler consumes the screen. Finally, the title of the documentary appears in white letters superimposed over an aerial shot of Auschwitz, swooping down onto the reddish vein of rusting train tracks leading into the camp and the platform where millions of feet beat their last steps: What Happened? Sam Mansour stands on this platform as the camera zooms in; he is wearing the same black pants and blue shirt he had been wearing at Trudy’s, the color of the shirt matching his eyes. His thick, dark hair is carefully combed, and he is waiting for us, the audience, to join him. His voice suits the role, educated, evocative, authoritative, believable; ironically, he looks and sounds more like a rabbi than a Palestinian doctoral student attempting to disprove the Holocaust, which only adds to his credibility. Smiling, he introduces himself as Sam Mansour, furthering the friendly academic impression, and he asks the audience a very serious question: What Happened? He talks to the camera as he walks toward the showers, explaining the purpose of the film and assuring us that he has no agenda other than the truth. As his proofs unfold, he asks us to leap with him the many gaps in logic and evidence that must be leaped, but keeps coming back to the “truth,” always the truth, insisting on it, demanding that we believe he is acting in our best interest.
As a matter of cinematography, with the parabolic camera angles, haunting guard tower lighting, and echo chamber sound effects-as if everything is being spoken inside a concentration camp shower-the documentary is exceptionally good at creating the impression of actually being there during the dark days. Watching it for the first time in his bedroom, Ott is mesmerized. The filmmaker’s skill, and Ott’s own desperate desire to believe, help him to overlook the warnings in Sam’s pleas for trust and the many discrepancies that strain reason as the documentary unfolds. Ott, of course, has never read the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials or the many Nazi documents admitting the atrocities; he has never visited the death camps in Poland, only Germany, or critically examined the evidence and photographs in the archives and museums; he is not told by the narrator that although Zyklon B residue cannot be found inside the showers, the chemical byproducts of the gas coat the walls; he is not shown the interviews of the survivors, with the horror still reflected in their eyes; nor has he read the books or seen the films that scrolled across the beginning of the documentary, if it can even loosely be called this and not propaganda. No, Ott Bowles sees only what he wants to see: the vindication of his family unfolding before him like a sweet dream.
Bo waited until after the story aired to tell me that the weekend nights he supposedly spent on call at the station were actually spent camped out in our car, in the woods outside The Eleven’s compound, with a cell phone in his hand and one of my grandfather’s shotguns across his lap, waiting for Bobby Wilson, his producer, to come out alive with the damning video-and ready to go in after him if necessary. I made him promise never to do anything that stupid again.
As a reward for their work and the risks they had taken, the station promoted Bobby to senior producer and offered Bo the anchor position on the morning news, with the promise of moving him up to the noon and five o’clock time slots as soon as his desk skills improved. We were ecstatic. People at the grocery store and mall began stopping Bo for autographs, and I was the wife of a local celebrity. These were happy times: my law practice was growing, our daughter was thriving, and Bo’s dream of becoming an anchorman at a major market television station, or even on one of the networks, looked more promising than ever. How bitter to learn that the source of our triumph would soon become the cause of our tragedy, the end not only of our hopes and dreams, but of our family itself.
I also learned from Ott Bowles that Holden Hurley had made considerable progress in preparing his new computer network for war. The EFT intranet was powered by redundant computer servers and systems in Atlanta, Palo Alto, Dublin, and Madras, each equipped with military grade encryption software and scrambled satellite telecommunications access. He built multiple firewalls into the system, and everything could be operated with special codes from laptop computers by remote digital command.
Stored on the hard drives of these servers were the e-mail and street addresses and telephone numbers of Caucasian teens and young adults across the United States, cross-matched to demographic data taken, legally and illegally, from public and private databanks. Also on the hard drives were the names, addresses, and detailed biographical data of Jewish and African-American political, educational, media, and religious leaders. Other directories stored strategic information, including the locations, specifications, and computer access numbers for metropolitan water and energy supply grids, banking and financial institutions, air traffic control systems, military installations, and national telecommunications centers.