One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (49 page)

The car radio was on, and there was a report that the perpetrator was Norwegian.

In the car, somebody lent Lara a
phone. She rang her father.

‘We’re on our way to fetch you,’ he cried.

When news started to come through of the shooting on Utøya, all the neighbours had gathered at the Rashids’. They, too, tried ringing the numbers on the TV screen, but failed to get though. One of the neighbours had found out that a centre for next of kin had been set up at the Thon Hotel in Sandvika. Now they were in a taxi
on their way there, because Mustafa was under too much nervous strain to drive himself. He and Bayan picked up Ali from the little field near by, where the fourteen-year-old had been playing football with some friends. They could look after him, the friends’ parents said, but no, Ali wanted to come along to fetch his sisters.

‘How are you?’ Lara’s father asked her.

Lara went quiet. ‘Dad,’ she
said. ‘Dad … I don’t know where Bano is.’

‘Aren’t you with her?’

Lara wept.

They agreed that the first to hear anything from Bano would ring the other.

Ali was sitting in the back seat with Bayan. He tried to reassure his mother. ‘You know how smart Bano is. She’s the best at finding good places to hide. That’s why nobody’s found her yet!’

Their taxi driver was from Morocco and had a copy
of the Qur’an in the dashboard. Bayan read the holy scripture and asked God to look after their elder daughter, their firstborn.

Mustafa sat in the front, muttering to himself.

God, there is no god but He, Living and Everlasting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs what is in the heavens and what is on earth.

It was the same prayer, Ayat al-Kursi, that he had prayed in the
boat on the Khabur river between Iraq and Syria, the prayer he had turned to as he lay sleepless during the civil war.

He knows their present affairs and their past. And they do not grasp of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne encompasses the heavens and the earth; Preserving them is no burden to him. He is the Exalted, the Majestic.

It was a long time since he had needed that prayer.

In Sandvika they had a long wait before they were informed that everyone from Utøya had been sent to Sundvolden Hotel by the Tyrifjord. Bano did not ring. Bayan wept and groaned. ‘My child, my child!’ she sobbed.

One of the other mothers took care of her. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ said the slender woman, putting her arm round her. Her name was Kirsten and she also had a child on the island,
she said. His name was Håvard, and he was the leader of the Oslo AUF. They had not heard anything from their son for some hours now, either. He had sent them the last message just after six, from his hiding place by the pumping station. Kirsten offered them a lift in their family’s car to Sundvolden. But with Ali they were too many, so they took a taxi.

It was starting to get dark as they set
off on the long circuit of the Tyrifjord.

‘Everything will be fine,’ Bayan said to Ali as they got into another back seat. ‘We’ll soon have both the girls with us.’

The taxi turned out of Sandvika, and Bayan looked at her son and smiled. ‘You’ll see, Bano will ring soon and say: “I’m fine!”’

*   *   *

At Sundvolden Hotel, Lara could not share in the scenes of joy as people were reunited. She
went out into the rain in her already sodden clothes. She had no more tears left, no more screams.

She waited in the car park outside for the buses and cars bringing young people from Utøya. She scrutinised the vehicles, her eyes surveying windows and doors and fixing on every figure to climb out in front of her, then moving on.

There was a pale, red-headed boy with freckles standing at a slight
distance. He was soaked through. Torje had stayed hidden in the hole in the rock at the waterline for a long time. When a boat came to rescue youngsters from the water, he swam towards it. He was almost there when shots began to whistle overhead. The boat beat a rapid retreat. Torje was left alone in the water. He swam back to the island and went ashore. He was too cold to swim out again to the
hiding place. On several occasions, Torje was close to the gunman, but he always managed to get away or hide.

The fourteen-year-old rang his parents once the bus had brought him from the jetty. They were on their way. They had waited three hours at Sollihøgda and then they had decided to drive almost all the way round the Tyrifjord. They had rung, rung off, and rung again. Torje and Viljar grew
younger and younger in their mother’s mind as they drove. By the time they came into Sundvolden, she was seeing them as two tiny tots.

Torje was waiting for Viljar and Johannes. His big brother and his best friend.

Then someone told him no more buses would be coming.

*   *   *

‘When Bano Rashid arrives, can you tell her this is our room number?’

Lara was exhausted with waiting, and since
there were no more buses coming she’d gone in and asked for a room. They gave her a key. ‘Bano’s got long dark hair and, well, she looks like me. She’s my older sister.’

She dragged herself over to the lift.

She’s alive, thought Lara as she got up to the room. She had borrowed a computer at reception and had put a heart on Bano’s Facebook page.

She must be alive, because if she were dead, I
would feel it. And I don’t feel as if she’s dead, she said to herself.

*   *   *

In a room in the same wing of the hotel, Margrethe looked at the king-size bed.

This posh room! How she hated this posh room! It was all wrong.

‘We’ll get in the car and come for you,’ her parents in Stavanger had said when she finally rang home to tell them she was alive.

‘No, don’t do that,’ she had answered
in a flat voice. ‘I’ll get myself home.’

Everything in the room was smooth and shiny. It was all ironed and pressed and polished. She pulled aside the cover, threw out the scatter cushions and lay down under the quilt. A soft, clean, warm quilt. That was when she broke down. She simply could not bear it.

To lie under the lovely quilt, while Simon was left lying out there, alone in the rain.

*   *   *

‘There is only me,’ he had said.

That was while Håvard Gåsbakk was still sitting astride him. It was a little after half past six in the evening. His body was pressed against the damp ground. His nose was in the wet grass, in fresh leaves, earth and moss. With his head bent to one side, he carried on talking.

‘The third cell has still not been activated This is the start of hell! It’s
going to get worse.’

His voice was hard, militant.

Worse than this? Gåsbakk shivered. He reported over the radio that a nationwide alert should be issued, warning of a further attack.

Breivik looked up at Gåsbakk. ‘I can tell you ninety-eight per cent, but I want to negotiate about the last two per cent.’

‘You’ve said enough. Head down!’ said Gåsbakk. He could hear the others in the team calling
for medical packs and giving details of the dead and wounded.

‘This is a
coup d’état
,’ said the man lying beneath him, bound hand and foot.

Gåsbakk had to keep the man down and quiet, that was his task, not to negotiate with him.

He heard a thin voice, painful cries.

A little boy emerged through the trees. A dark-skinned teenager with blood on his chest held him by the hand. The child was
sobbing. ‘I want my dad, I want my dad!’

The man on the ground was breathing heavily. The chemical effect of all the stimulants was wearing off, but he was still high on what his own body was producing. He was high on the murders he had committed, the hormones it had released in him.

At times he coud not get enough air into his lungs and started hyperventilating, lying there on the ground between
the schoolhouse and the southern tip of the island.

After half an hour or so, one of the Delta officers took over the apprehended man. Gåsbakk ran to the main building to help with the rescue work.

‘What shall we do with the dead bodies?’ came the question.

What should they do with the dead bodies?

Gåsbakk looked around him.

‘Pull those on the shoreline up far enough to stop them floating
out into the water, the others can stay where they are,’ he replied into the radio.

*   *   *

Three men had arrived from the Organised Crime Section, Special Operations. Their most important task was to find out whether further attacks could be expected. It was vital to stop any further loss of life.

The initial interviews would be carried out on the island. Transporting Breivik to Oslo before
the island was secured, before the rescue operation was complete, would tie up too much manpower.

Headquarters were set up in the white wooden building above the landing stage, where the camp administration and Mother Utøya had been based. This was where the AUF leader had been sitting to follow the TV news when the first shots rang out, three hours earlier.

Victims were still lying wounded
on the island when two policemen from the emergency response unit brought the prisoner up the grassy slope to the HQ.

A short set of stone steps led up to the building. Wide, safe steps of old granite. Just beside them in the grass lay three bodies. Monica and the two security guards, fathers of the small boys who were now calling out for their dads.

The three interviewers stood waiting for
Breivik outside the building. It was a quarter past eight when they took over his supervision from Delta, about an hour and a half after he had been apprehended. The Delta men also handed over a mobile phone and a jacket badge with a skull and crossbones on it.
Marxist Hunter
, the badge said. The lead interrogator unfastened the handcuffs keeping the killer’s hands behind his back and cuffed them
in front instead. ‘You might just as well execute me here on the ground floor,’ said Breivik when they ordered him upstairs.

‘You’re not going to be shot. We’re going to talk to you,’ said the lead interviewer.

Breivik looked at him.

‘I’m going to die anyway,’ he said, and explained that he had taken a great number of chemical substances. He was dehydrating and would die within two hours if
he did not get something to drink.

They took him up to the first floor and put him in an armchair. In the room were a table, a large sofa, several armchairs and a few two-seater sofas. Breivik was given a bottle of fizzy drink.

The interviewers took a sofa each.

‘You are suspected of murder. You are not obliged to explain yourself to the police, and you can—’

Breivik interrupted. ‘That’s okay.
I can explain myself. In broad terms.’

He sat facing the table with his cuffed hands in his lap.

‘I have sacrificed myself. I have no life after this. I may very well suffer and be tortured for the rest of my life. I shall never get out. My life ended when I ordained myself into the Knights Templar. But what is it you actually want to talk to me about? I’m surprised they haven’t sent the secret
services to interrogate me.’

‘What were you trying to achieve here today? And is anything else going to happen?’

‘We want to take power in Europe within sixty years. I am a commander of the Knights Templar. Our organisation was set up in London in 2002 with delegates from twelve countries.’

He stressed that they were not Nazis, and that they supported Israel. They were not racists, but they
wanted political Islam out of Europe. It could be called a conservative revolution. ‘But I’ve written a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto on this, I can’t explain it all now,’ he said.

‘Is there anything else on the island?’

‘No.’

‘Explosive charges? Weapons?’

‘No, that’s over and done with.’

‘Your car on the other side, is it booby-trapped?’

‘No, but my shotgun’s in there.’

‘Are there others
here apart from you?’

‘No,’ he said, but suddenly thought better of it. ‘There’s something else, but I won’t tell you what, or where it is. I’m willing to negotiate with you. I want a proper arrangement, with something in return for the information.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘If you want to save three hundred lives, then listen to me carefully. But I would really have preferred to negotiate with the secret
services.’

‘Tell us what you know. Lots of innocent lives have been lost today,’ said the interrogator.

‘I wouldn’t exactly call these innocent. They are extreme Marxists. Marxist spawn. It’s the Labour Party, the youth wing. They’re the ones with the power in Norway. They’re the ones who have presided over the Islamisation of Norway.’

‘Will any more lives be lost?’

‘Of course. This is only
the beginning. The civil war has started. I don’t want Islam in Europe, and my fellow partisans share my views. We don’t want Oslo to end up like Marseille, where Muslims have been in the majority since 2010. We want to fight for Oslo. My operation has succeeded one hundred per cent, which is why I’m giving myself up now. But the operation itself is not important. These are just the fireworks.’

He looked down at his hands. There was a bit of blood on one finger.

‘Look, I’m hurt,’ he said. ‘This will have to be bandaged up. I’ve already lost a lot of blood.’

‘You’ll get no fucking plasters from me,’ muttered the policeman who was taking messages between the interview room and the room next door, where they were in contact with the staff in Oslo.

‘I can’t afford to lose too much blood,’
said Breivik. ‘And I’ve lost half a litre already.’He claimed that the blood loss could make him pass out.

Sticking plasters were procured.

While the plasters were being applied, Breivik wondered why he was bleeding. He remembered something hitting his finger when he shot a victim in the head at close range. Something had flown into his finger and then popped out again. It must have been a bit
of skull, he told the officers in the room.

The cut was logged as five millimetres long. The interrogation could continue.