One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  There was one news item that cast a slight shadow over the festivities. The previous night, a russ 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 russ 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. Marx
ist 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!’

  On 13 February 2011 he turned thirty-two, and two days after his birthday, which he did not celebrate, he started editing the film that was to ‘market the compendium’ he was in the process of compiling. He downloaded images from anti-Islamic websites and added music he liked, dramatic and emotive. Twelve days later he was satisfied with his film. He noted in his log: ‘I would love to make it even better but I can’t really afford to invest any more time into this trailer which might never see the light of day…’ He added: ‘Was planning to hire a low-cost Asian movie guy through scriptlance.com but I have to conserve my funds.’

  By February, his weight had gone up from 86 to 93 kilos and he had never felt in better shape. He was 50 per cent stronger, he thought, and this would undoubtedly prove useful, he underlined in his log.

  In the spring, just before he moved away from home, he received a letter from the Freemasons’ lodge with an offer of promotion to degree 4 and 5 even though he had hardly attended any meetings. He replied that he was not available, because he was away travelling for extended periods. He no longer needed the lodge that he had once implored to admit him. He had created his own lodge, where he made the rules.

  * * *

  The letting contract had been signed on 5 April, and the very next day the new farmer at Vålstua contacted the Norwegian Agricultural Producers’ Register to inform them of changes at Breivik Geofarm. The business address was to be changed from Oslo to the district of Åmot. The farm’s change of use to the production of root crops and tubers would have to be registered. The farm would have to have a new business code, and he needed a producer number in order to get fertiliser.

  He was now so hyped up that he abandoned his usual caution and let his impatience for formal approval from the Producers’ Register show, to the extent that the official dealing with his case began to wonder. In mid-April, the official carried out a background check on Breivik.

  ‘He keeps on pestering … Is there anything on him?’ he queried in an email to his boss, requesting a check on the tenant at Vålstua. Nothing showed up, and a week later confirmation was sent out that the change of use had been approved.

  On 4 May Anders hired a Fiat Doblò from Avis and moved out of his mother’s flat. He had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser on credit. The bags were delivered the day he moved in at Vålstua. As agreed, half of it was driven into the barn, the other half unloaded beside some birch trees on the property.

  That first day on the farm, he constructed the metal framework of the bomb. The next day he started crushing the aspirin tablets to extract the acetylsalicylic acid. The internet advised him to use a pestle and mortar, but within a couple of hours his hands were aching terribly and he had pulverised only a small portion of the tablets. There had to be another way. He put a large sheet of plastic on the floor of the barn and started crushing them with a twenty-kilo dumbbell he used for weight training. Four hours later, he had crushed a hundred and fifty packets of aspirin.

  Many of the instructions were defective. He experimented and failed, tried different things and took a creative approach. He went to IKEA and bought three toilet brushes with steel holders to use as detonator containers. He planned to seal them with aluminium discs cut to shape, or screws and coins. From China he bought sixty waterproof bags ideal for storing and transporting chemicals.

  When it came to extracting the acetylsalicylic acid from the powdered aspirin, none of the instructions he tried seemed to work and he ended up with useless salicylic acid. He trawled the internet desperately and dejection set in. ‘If I couldn’t even synthesise the first phase of the easiest booster how on earth would I manage to synthesise DDNP?! My world crashed that day and I tried to develop an alternative plan,’ he wrote in his log. To raise his spirits he went to a restaurant in the local town of Rena and treated himself to a three-course meal. Then he watched a few episodes of The Shield.

  His mood swings were rapid and sharp. The steroids were affecting his mental state as well as his muscles. He could push himself more but he could also go to pieces without warning. But he always pulled himself together again, aware of the pressure of time.

  None of the methods he had found online, primarily laboratory experiments from various universities, had enabled him to extract the acid concentration he needed. The next day proved fruitless too. He went out to the restaurant again in the evening to give himself a morale boost and ponder a new plan. ‘I appear to be fundamentally fucked if I cannot manage to find a solution soon,’ he wrote in his log on Saturday evening, 7 May.

  When he woke up on Sunday morning, he went straight on to the internet. After several hours he found a YouTube video with very few previous hits. It showed an unconventional method for extracting the acid he wanted. The guy in the video used a suction pump and a dehumidifier in a laboratory, and succeeded where all the other chemists on the web had failed.

  On Monday morning Anders tried doing the same himself, using coffee filters and natural air-drying rather than lab equipment. Despite not being entirely sure that it was in fact purified acetylsalicylic acid he had produced, he decided he had no option but to stake everything on the method. A calculated risk, he wrote in the log, since he could not know the quality of the product he had made. He used Tuesday to make the ice required for the extraction process. He filled the freezer with ice-cube bags, and had to make sure each layer had frozen before he added the next, so the bags would not tear under the weight of the next layer. He spent the whole week filtering.

  ‘I just love Eurovision,’ he noted in the log on Saturday 14 May, awarding himself a night off to watch the final of the song contest. He had watched all the semi-finals. ‘My country has a crap, politically correct contribution as always. An asylum seeker from Kenya, performing a bongo song, very representative of Europe and my country … In any case, I hope Germany wins.’

  Azerbaijan won.

  The day before Norwegian National Day the magnetic stirrer, a special hotplate for heating unstable fluids, stopped working. ‘Fuck, Chinese piece of shit equipment, I should have rather paid more to get good European quality machinery!’ he wrote, and ordered another one. It would take too long to produce picric acid and DDNP without a magnetic stirrer.

  That evening he completed the extraction of the acid he needed from the last aspirin tablets, using a spatula to get the remains of the crystallised material out of the coffee filters. He spread it on plastic, and with the help of an oil heater raised the temperature in the room to thirty degrees to dry the acetylsalicylic acid.

  * * *

  The bubbling sulphuric acid enveloped the yard in a dim blanket of gas. He turned off the hotplates and let them cool, hung his lab apron and gas mask in the barn and went in to make something to eat. He liked to eat well. Food was a comfort and a reward.

  He sat in the farmhouse as evening drew in. There was no question of going out among other people. He kept a polite distance from the neighbours. ‘Welcome to our village,’ the woman who lived nearest had said cheerily the first time they met, holding out her hand, but luckily she had never come to visit. He was on nodding terms with the rest. He had made sure to give the impression that Vålstua was not a place to drop round for coffee.

  In the surrounding hamlets, National Day was drawing to a close. Silver brooches and cuff links were pu
t away in pretty boxes lined with cotton wool or velvet, starched blouses were thrown into the washing machine and traditional costumes were brushed and hung away in the wardrobe. Children’s faces were scrubbed clean of ice cream and ketchup, and the national anthem and all those marches could finally take a rest in the music cases of the school band. The delicate wood anemones started to hang their heads in their vases, and at 9 p.m. everyone lowered their Norwegian flags.

  Most people agreed that the 17 May celebrations in their valley had been as good as last year, well, apart from the fact that the red, white and blue bunting had not gone up along the pedestrian precinct in the local town. The metal hooks on the walls of the buildings were bare and some thought it was the district council’s responsibility, others that it was the business community’s. The following day, Østlendingen would try to get to the bottom of it and apportion blame where it was due.

  The hamlet-dwellers had not sensed the smell of sulphur hanging over the delicate green shoots in the fields. None of Østlendingen’s newshounds had seen the clouds of black smoke, and none of the neighbours on the banks of the Glomma had wondered why the West End boy from Oslo had stayed at home on National Day.

  As darkness began to fall he went back out. He turned the hotplate to its top setting and put the container on it. The thick black smoke would start billowing up again around midnight, but by then it would be as dark as it gets in Østerdalen in mid-May, and for a few hours the smoke would be indistinguishable from the night.

  Below the farm, the cold waters of the Glomma rushed onward. The river had a powerful force to it, swollen by the meltwater it was carrying down from the mountains. Wherever you were on the farm, you could hear its roar. When he took over the place at the start of May there were still a few chunks of ice sailing by, having broken off from the ice fields north of Glombrua. The spring flood usually lasted far into June. It would be July before the river calmed. Then it grew idle and drowsy, scarcely bothering to flow at all in the summer heat.