Hurley’s great dream, confided to Ott as he showed him how to operate many of the EFT systems, was to disrupt the computer networks controlling public utilities, financial institutions, the Internet, and airline travel, but make it appear as though the commands to create all of this chaos had come from computers in Israel and certain American Jewish leaders and institutions. As the nation ground to a halt and panic ensued, Hurley would leak anonymous rumors that there was a plot by Jews to take control of the economic system, and e-mail messages to that effect would be sent to white teens and young people as a call to action. None of these rumors would be believed at first, but authorities tracing the hackers would follow a trail back to the computers of Jewish leaders, which Hurley would also infect with bits of anti-Christian e-mail, and e-mails about seizing control of financial institutions. The conspiracy would thus be proved. As Jews attempted to defend themselves, wide-scale violence would erupt, instigated by key assassinations perpetrated by The Eleven and other white supremacist groups encouraged by having their paranoia finally confirmed. Hurley would then send false e-mails to African-American leaders claiming that white supremacist groups were attacking African-Americans around the country, unleashing more racial violence and riots in the streets. In this way, a full-scale religious and race war would be started, and Holden Hurley-with The Eleven’s advanced organization and secure communications-would emerge as a savior and defender of white Christian America and fundamental conservative American values. “It worked in Rwanda,” Hurley told Ott, referring to the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis ignited just a few months earlier by a similar disinformation campaign, “and it will work here. Mixing hatred and fear always leads to an explosion.” Holden Hurley’s dreams were never nagged by a conscience, or constrained by reason or reality.
Ott Bowles regarded all this as the ranting of a madman, but during the confusion surrounding Hurley’s arrest, and the void of leadership within The Eleven in the wake of Brian Shelly’s death and Sam Mansour’s flight from the country, he had the presence of mind to gather the EFT computer manuals, access numbers, and passwords and store them in a safe location. The idea for kidnapping Sarah and me to force the networks to air the documentary came later. To his credit, he never planned to harm us. That was Tim Shelly’s idea.
39
The building in the woods to which Ott Bowles and Tim Shelly drove Sarah and me that Friday night in October, 1994, was the original mushroom house on the old Shelly farm near Kennett Square, built by Tim’s great-grandfather, Clifton Shelly, in the nineteen-thirties when most mushrooms were harvested in the wild and people were just learning how to grow them commercially. Clifton Shelly, like his father and grandfather before him, was a dairy farmer, but he began experimenting with mushroom farming when he saw the demand for the edible fungi far exceeding the supply provided by the trained gatherers who roamed humid forests with sacks looking for mushrooms sprouting in the shaded, biologically rich compost beneath trees. To re-create and better control these conditions, and to make harvesting easier and less a matter of chance, he erected a windowless, block building at the bottom of an isolated ravine, away from prying eyes and near a pond where ice could be harvested during the winter to cool the mushroom house in the summer and water would be plentiful to humidify the air and moisten the compost soil. Soon he was producing sizable crops of the fungi and taking them to market, stunning grocers and mushroom gatherers alike with the volume and consistency he produced. As fungiculture techniques advanced and profits grew, he replaced his milking parlors and corncribs with mushroom houses and abandoned the original mushroom house at the bottom of the ravine because it was too small and remote for large-scale production.
Tim Shelly was certain the large California-based agribusiness conglomerate that purchased his family’s mushroom farm at auction after his father died had no idea the old mushroom house at the bottom of the ravine even existed. Almost nobody did. It was far removed from the rest of the buildings and secluded deep in the woods, now overgrown with heavy brush. He suggested it to Ott when Ott told him about his plan to kidnap Sarah and me to force the networks to air the documentary. In such a remote location, he reasoned, there would be virtually no chance of detection, and with masonry walls and no windows, there would be virtually no chance of escape. Ott looked the building over and thought it would do, but to be certain he drove in and out at different hours of the day and night, and he even stayed for a few days in an outbuilding next to the mushroom house to see whether anyone would notice. No one did.
This outbuilding, which was basically an old wooden storage shed with a couple of windows, is where Ott and Tim stayed after they kidnapped Sarah and me. They stocked it in advance of our arrival with food for several weeks, plus a generator, two laptop computers, a satellite telephone, and several crates filled with assault rifles, ammunition, body armor, and rocket propelled grenades taken from The Eleven’s compound. They covered the car we arrived in with a tarp and shoveled mushroom soil over it so it couldn’t be seen from the air. It was from near this outbuilding, and from one of these laptop computers, that Ott sent an e-mail message to Bo when we arrived, attaching a digital photograph he had taken of Sarah and me in the mushroom house with a gun pointed at Sarah’s head. Ott made no attempt to conceal his identity-he wanted the world to know exactly who he was and why he was doing what he was doing-but he did use the EFT computer servers and encryption software to conceal our location, routing his e-mail from server to server around the world, deleting the message headers and identification tags, and making it appear as though the transmissions originated from somewhere in India. Ott’s only stated demand in the e-mail was to have Sam Mansour’s documentary aired during primetime by a national television network; if that happened, he promised, Bo and the world would witness our safe return and Ott’s voluntary surrender to the authorities. He explained in the e-mail that a videocassette copy of the documentary could be found on the front passenger seat of my car, which was parked in a grove of pine trees just off the old logging road in Ardenheim. He made no demands for money or even for Hurley’s release from prison; asked only that the world consider the possibility that the Nazi gassings had been a fabrication, and that his family and the German people had been wrongly convicted of genocide. Since Bo was a television news reporter, this simple request shouldn’t be too much, and he gave Bo three days to make the necessary arrangements. He made no express threat against our lives, and in his heart he never thought it would come to that; so convinced was he of the objective merits of the film that he believed the networks would jump at the chance to air it once they saw it. He fully expected a reply message from Bo within hours with the air date and time, and he had a portable television with satellite reception ready, from which he could watch the documentary when it aired and monitor news reports of our kidnapping.
Despite my attempted escape and being kneed in the groin, Ott was delighted with how well things had gone that first night. Sarah and I were locked away in the mushroom house, and an e-mail reply from Bo came within an hour, telling Ott he was doing everything possible to have the tape aired and begging him for our safe return. Two hours later, all the television news networks were carrying the story of our kidnapping with photographs of Sarah and me, and photographs of Ott, Holden Hurley, Tim Shelly, and Sam Mansour. The fact that Bo was a television news reporter and that I was an attorney-and that Sarah and I had been kidnapped by a white supremacist attempting to disprove the Holocaust-touched off a media firestorm, fanned hotter by the prospect of a mysterious Holocaust documentary, an international manhunt for a fugitive Arab, and Ott’s skillful use of computer technology to communicate while concealing our location. By the next morning, the network and cable news programs were featuring experts on neo-Nazi groups, the Holocaust, hostage negotiations, and the Internet, together with mediated debates among Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and African-American leaders brought together to confront the underlying pathology of Holden Hurley. It was exactly the kind of international media sensation Ott wanted.