One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (31 page)

Simon dutifully accompanied his parents and Håvard to the local party in Upper Salangen, where they had once lived, next door to his grandparents. Now he was the hero; just imagine, the
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president himself had put in an
appearance. He played along and stayed in his role, while the children competed for his attention.

The midnight sun was just three days away. In the months to come, the sun would never set.

The Sæbø family turned into the drive of the blue house on the bend, just below the church, where the key was always under the doormat. Simon stumbled into his room, pulled off his
russ
overalls and collapsed
into bed. By the window looking out over the fjord, the red and yellow Manchester United logo painted on the wall stood out boldly. To shield himself from the bright evening light he had closed the curtains. The design on the fabric was of a boy with a skateboard under one arm and a football under the other.

Still, it was not entirely dark. Above his bed shone a heart. It was made out of fluorescent
stars. Stars his girlfriend had stuck on his ceiling one evening.

A few more weeks of school and then summer stretched ahead, shiny and glorious.

He had got himself a job in the churchyard, just up the hill behind the house. All he had to do was cross the garden, step over the fence and walk a little way along the road, then he could go in through the gate by the church. His job would be to
cut the grass, weed and water and keep the graves tidy throughout the summer holidays, apart from a couple of weeks, for which he had other plans. It would make a nice change to potter round the peaceful churchyard, be outside, feel the sun and get away from the classroom.

So, at last: over the summer, real life would begin. JFK had it all mapped out.

In one of the books on his shelf there was
a quotation: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’

One day he was going to make speeches like Kennedy too.

Poison

A thousand kilometres further south, in one of Norway’s thickest forests, a man stood in an open yard, boiling up sulphuric acid. The clear, viscous liquid was bubbling on an improvised hotplate and a stench of rotten eggs hung in the air. He was in the lee of a red-painted barn and could not be seen from the road. An electric cable, ten metres long, trailed to a socket inside the barn.

The farm consisted of a white-painted house, the barn, a summer cowshed, farmhands’ quarters and a red storehouse raised on pillars, plus a garage. It lay on the eastern side of the Glomma river and looked out over dense forest to the east, while the view to the west was of green pasture and fields. The coltsfoot was blooming at the edges of the ditches and white wood anemones carpeted the dark
ground beneath the fir trees.

Vålstua, built around 1750, was the first smallholding attached to the larger farm of Vål, a bit further down the wide river. Some ground and a small patch of forest went with it, but it was quite a few years since the place had been properly farmed. The owner was in prison for having run a hash plantation there. Presumably he had thought it was easy to hide away
in the country, people said, shaking their heads. But no, if there was one place where the locals kept their eyes open it was here, and everybody knew there had been funny business going on at Vålstua. You hardly ever saw the people who lived there, yet there had been feverish activity in the outbuildings. People noticed things like that.

Before he began his sentence, the owner advertised the
farm for rent on various websites. A young man from Oslo got in touch. He was going to start sugar beet production, he said. When he came to look round, he told the owner that he had completed three thousand hours of self-tuition in agronomy, and knew someone at the agricultural college at Ås. The farm was idyllic, and the place got the sun late into the evening, the owner responded. Afterwards he
told his girlfriend he’d been surprised that the well-dressed young West Ender did not say a word about the beautiful views and scarcely bothered to look at the main farmhouse.

They agreed on a rent of ten thousand kroner a month. The owner wished his new tenant the best of luck and went off to serve his sentence of a couple of years.

*   *   *

The sound of drums and trumpets carried from the
nearby hamlets. A light morning mist lay over the landscape, but sunny intervals were forecast for later in the day.

No 17 May celebration would be complete without some mild admonitions from the local paper. This year,
Østlendingen
had advised local residents not to buy confetti spray, which contained harmful solvents. Customs had stopped large quantities of it at the Swedish border in the run-up
to National Day, the paper reported. And the
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had been banned from bringing water pistols to their procession in case they frightened children, prompting vehement protests from the
russ
.

These were the topics of conversation as the children played and the older people took wood anemones and wreaths of birch leaves to their family graves in the churchyard, in accordance with local tradition.

There was one news item that cast a slight shadow over the festivities. The previous night, a
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van belonging to a girl from an immigrant background had been daubed with swastikas. Nobody wanted that sort of thing here.

The man at Vålstua was too preoccupied by his bubbling sulphuric acid to have any particular thoughts about National Day. The smallholding was in any case too far from the
nearest village for the school bands or the honking horns of the
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to disturb him. His pale blue eyes stared through a respirator mask, fixed on the sulphuric acid. He was wearing yellow rubber gloves and a heavy-duty protective apron bought from a supplier of laboratory wear. His ash-blond hair, cut short, revealed a slightly grubby brow. His skin had a greyish tinge, the typical complexion
of a northerner who has spent a long winter indoors and was now squinting at the sun for the first time.

The hotplate was standing on a cast-off TV stand he had brought out into the yard. He turned up the heat as high as it would go and the acid soon came to the boil. His aim was to reduce the water content to increase its concentration. The farmhouse was littered with scraps of paper covered
in numbers and calculations. He had worked out that it would take him three days and nights to reduce the roughly thirty litres of sulphuric acid from 30% to 90% concentration.

After an hour and a half the steam, initially all but invisible in the overcast weather, started to change character. It gradually turned into white smoke, then grey, and at the end of two hours the smoke was so thick
and black that he was worried the neighbours would see it and pulled the plug. The smoke continued to billow for a while and he decided that from now on he would work at night, so as not to attract unwanted attention.

He had obtained the acid from various car dealers. At one breaker’s yard he bought seven litres of 30% sulphuric acid. From a used-car dealer he bought four car batteries that contained
a total of six litres of acid, and Exide Sønnak, a wholesaler to car repair shops, was able to supply another twenty-five litres. They had sold out of small cans, so it aroused no suspicion when he bought a large one. But the salesman was concerned for his customer’s safety and how he was going to secure the container of the highly corrosive fluid for transport. Well, if he’d had a crash,
he wouldn’t need a new mask for Halloween, he joked in his diary once he was safely back home.

Buying in all the chemicals had been the most critical phase, in fact, with the greatest risk of discovery. When he started ordering the elements for making the bomb in October 2010 – the previous autumn – he was still living with his mother in Oslo. He had often been scared. If he bungled this and
came to the attention of the authorities he would be done for, neutralised before he could carry out the operation.

He’d had to overcome his anxiety before he could cope with making his purchases and had started a course of anabolic steroids while also intensifying his bodybuilding regime. He’d downloaded some new vocal trance music and bought Blizzard’s latest expansion pack for
World of Warcraft
, the newly launched
Cataclysm
, which he allowed himself to play to get his courage up. There, he was on home ground, among friends and enemies, on territory he had mastered, where his score was always rising.

With a bit of post hoc rationalisation he judged this combination of anti-anxiety measures, in addition to three weekly walks that were an opportunity for ‘meditation and indoctrination’,
to have raised his morale and motivation to a whole new level. Or so he wrote in the log, which he later incorporated into the third and final part of his book.

Making a bomb was not easy. He had studied various instructions on the internet, from detailed dissertations to practical explosion experiments on YouTube. Several had been put up by laboratories and amateur chemists, some by al-Qaida
and other militant organisations.

He gave the delivery address for the chemicals he ordered as 18 Hoffsveien. Via eBay he ordered powdered sulphur from the US, which was described on the carriage declaration as ‘yellow artist paint dust’. He ordered sodium nitrite from a company in Poland and sodium nitrate from a chemist’s shop in Skøyen. He made sure to have plausible cover stories. The powdered
sulphur was for cleaning out an aquarium; the sodium nitrate for treating meat: a few teaspoons of it mixed with salt and spices and rubbed into an elk carcass would slow the growth of bacteria and help the meat keep its colour when frozen – a method in general use among elk hunters.

The orders were swiftly dispatched and the goods started piling up in his room, in the basement and up in the
attic at Hoffsveien. Ethanol, acetone, caustic soda, flasks, glasses, bottles, funnels, thermometers and facemasks. He ordered powdered aluminium from Poland, telling the supplier that he wanted it for mixing with boat varnish to make it less permeable to UV radiation and that his company dealt in ‘coating solutions for the maritime sector’.

He bought a fuse several metres in length. For the
New Year celebrations, he would say if anybody asked. There were thousands of fireworks enthusiasts all round Europe who ordered that sort of thing for their displays. You could also learn how to make your own fuses from the various pyrotechnics forums on the internet, but it was safest to buy one.

It was crucial that it would be long enough. One centimetre equated to one second, so if you needed
five minutes to get away you had to buy a three-metre fuse.

He also needed several kilos of aspirin, from which to extract acetylsalicylic acid. It was good timing to be buying headache tablets in December, at the height of the party season. He had worked out that he needed a couple of hundred packets. Cash registers automatically blocked sales staff from selling more than two packets to each
customer, but he found out that there was a score of chemists’ shops within walking distance of Hoffsveien. He reckoned he would be able to get round them all in one day and took the tram to the Central Train Station. From there, he did an east-to-west circuit of all the chemists’, four to five times in the course of the winter at intervals of one to two weeks, until he had as much aspirin as he
needed. Initially he bought the most expensive brands, but he soon switched to the generic alternatives. He was perpetually nervous that the pharmacists would get suspicious and he dressed smartly, in conservative clothes with discreet designer logos, so the red flag would not go up.

December was a good month in every way. The post office was so overburdened with all the Christmas parcels that
it had reduced capacity for checking the contents of his orders of chemicals.

*   *   *

He bought protein powder to increase his muscle mass and milk thistle to strengthen his liver and mitigate the damage the steroids were doing to it. He also laid in supplies of powders and pills to boost his energy when carrying out the operation. He started attending shooting classes at Oslo Pistol Club
so he could get a firearms licence, and completed the required fifteen hours of training between November 2010 and January 2011. Two weeks into the new year he submitted an application to buy a semi-automatic Glock 17. He also took lessons to improve his rifle skills, particularly at distances of over a hundred metres. The shooting-based computer game
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
had also improved
his firing accuracy, he thought, and over the winter he bought laser sights from a variety of gun dealers, along with large quantities of ammunition.

From China he ordered liquid nicotine. His bullets would be filled with the poison. He could get everything he needed for this at the hardware shop: a little drill for making a hole in the bullets, a pair of cutters to take the tips off, a set of
files and some superglue to seal them up afterwards.

He bought a semi-automatic Storm Ruger rifle, the Mini-14 model, and a trigger that would make rapid firing easier. At the end of January he received notification from Intersport in Bogstadsveien that a silencer he had ordered could not be supplied; all private orders had been cancelled because of a bulk military order. He did not want to risk
a non-automatic silencer: it could overheat and explode during rapid fire, which could destroy the rifle. In the log he managed to turn this into a ‘bonus’, a word he was fond of using: ‘Without a silencer I can fix a bayonet to the rifle instead. Marxist on a Stick will soon be the exclusive Knights Templar Europe trademark.’ Without further ado he ordered a bayonet from Match Supply in the US,
which was identified on the customs declaration as sports equipment.

To document the process and help market the compendium, he had bought a camera, and planned to use Photoshop to compensate for his lack of photographic skill.

In the log he carefully wrote out his shopping list, encouraging all interested parties to follow his example: ‘There is absolutely NO GOOD REASON for not getting this
equipment out of fear you will be found out. All that is holding you back is unjustified anxiety and laziness! The only reason that could justify your fear is having an Islamic name!’