One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  He certainly did get noticed. The girls in the hairdresser’s where he once had a cut found him good-looking, while the man in the computer store decided he was gay. The Kurdish man in the kebab shop thought he was the nicest Norwegian he had ever met.

  * * *

  One of his flasks had started to crack and was leaking and dripping. It had been a big mistake only to buy two of those flasks and not four or five. This apparently trivial thing, the fact that he had bought too few flasks, cost him three or four days. By his own calculations he should have been ready by now. Ludicrous.

  It was actually rather boring work with a lot of waiting about. Once he had extracted the acid he had to wait four hours for it to cool from boiling point to room temperature, then another twelve hours until it cooled to fridge temperature, and finally another twelve to eighteen hours for it to warm up by four degrees to room temperature again. This meant that it took about forty hours in all to make one batch of DDNP. If only he had six flasks instead of just two!

  For the second time since he moved to the farm, he set out on a training run. First he gulped down a big protein shake to maximise what he got out of the workout, then he fixed a rucksack filled with stones on his back, another on his front, and carried a five-litre container filled with water in each hand. He lasted twenty minutes.

  It was taking so much longer to make the bomb than he had planned. Nor did he quite know how to finish it off. The internet was awash with different ways of doing it. He took a scientific approach and questioned the suggested methods, evaluating and discarding as he went.

  In the evening he relaxed with the vampire series True Blood or an episode of Dexter, the show about a serial killer. It annoyed him that all these series he watched were so keen to promote multiculturalism, but ‘such is life for the time being’, he wrote.

  Back in the early spring he had been struck by the number of creepy-crawlies on the farm. He could not stand them. Now they had bred and were more or less invading the farm. There must be colonies of spiders in the walls. One evening when he decided to treat himself to some sweets while he watched another episode, there was a spider in with the chocolate. He screamed. Spiders had crawled inside the gloves he wore when he was purifying his chemicals. ‘I freaked out … After that I started killing every little insect in view.’

  Some of his friends had started talking about coming to see him. Magnus had wanted to drop by when he came to see his girlfriend, who was on holiday near by. Anders had been careful not to give his friends an address in case they just turned up. They would realise that something was going on. But on the other hand, he could not just sever all contact. ‘Complete isolation and asocial behaviour can also defeat the whole purpose if you end up losing the love for the people you have sworn to protect. Because why would you bless your people with the ultimate gift of love if every single person hates you?’ he mused in the log.

  ‘I’m in Oslo this weekend,’ Anders said when Magnus rang. ‘But why don’t you come at the end of July?’

  * * *

  It was clearly not a farmer who had moved in at Vålstua. The grass was never cut, a windowpane had come loose, smashed and been left on the ground, while two wood battens had fallen off the barn wall. Three trees had blown down as well. But he simply had no energy to keep up with repairs. He had more than enough to do creating destruction.

  The neighbours gradually started to notice things. Why had he driven half the fertiliser straight into the barn? It was for spreading on the fields and was usually stored outside. What was more, he had put up a gate with a lock. When one of the neighbours commented on this, he said it was council regulations. That was strange, because nobody else had heard anything about the regulations. But life went on, people forgot, the year went on turning and summer came.

  He started losing weight. His steroids were nearly all gone. He would have to go to Oslo for more. He could combine this with testing the route he had devised for the day of the operation. The second day of July, he took the E18 past Oslo and then the E16 towards Hønefoss. Before long he had the Tyrifjord on his left-hand side. He spotted an unobtrusive sign for the track to the island of Utøya. He drove down the steep hill, parked on the jetty and went over to the boat that was moored there. He had read on the AUF website that it was called the MS Thorbjørn, named after Thorbjørn Jagland, a former Labour Party Prime Minister.

  He looked out over the sound. Until now he had only read about the island, seen pictures of it. Thought about it.

  Now there it lay, green and peaceful.

  He studied the old landing craft, considering whether bullets would penetrate its hull. He entered the coordinates into his GPS and familiarised himself with the roads in the vicinity. He also put in the coordinates of the nearby landing stage at Utvika. He called his destination points WoW1 and WoW2. If the police happened to stop him, he would say he was considering hiring Utøya to arrange a computer gaming conference there.

  Back in Oslo, he went to the Elixia gym in Sjølyst, close to his mother’s flat. In its bright premises with big windows and a view over a shopping precinct he went through his usual programme. He was surprised that he could lift as much weight as before he moved to Østerdalen; he had done hardly any training, after all. It must be the bomb manufacture that had kept him in shape. He felt exhilarated but then, halfway through the session, his head started to swim and he had to break off.

  He bought enough anabolic steroids for twenty more days. He favoured Winstrol, a synthetic derivative of the hormone testosterone. He knew it was doing his guts no good and he felt particularly concerned about his liver. Later that evening he took his mother out for dinner at an Indian restaurant. He said he was worried about liver damage. His mother found that an odd thing to be anxious about. Hadn’t he turned very strange all round recently? Strange and stressed.

  ‘There are spiders seeping out of the walls up there,’ he told his mother over the Indian meal. ‘They’re in my bed, they’re everywhere.’

  ‘If you clean and vacuum properly,’ his mother said, ‘you’ll soon get rid of them.’

  ‘The place is full of beetles, spiders and other flying and crawling things,’ he went on. A spider-ridden hell.

  ‘Well in that case I don’t think it’s worth ten thousand kroner a month,’ his mother replied. She was surprised at how worked up it made him to talk about the insects. A bundle of nerves, that was what he had become. It was very strange; she had imagined life on the farm would calm him down. He had told her how beautiful it was up there, and that he had a lovely view of the Glomma.

  Suddenly he looked sad.

  ‘I’ve grown so ugly,’ he said to his mother. ‘Look at my face!’

  ‘But you look normal.’

  ‘No, I’ve got ugly,’ he whimpered. He said he was thinking of having plastic surgery. At the very least, he wanted veneers on his teeth.

  Anders paid and drove his mother home. They had a cigarette on the balcony.

  ‘Don’t stand so close to me,’ he said suddenly. ‘People might think I’m retarded.’

  It sent a shiver through her. He had said something similar once before, when they were walking along the street together. He had asked her to walk a few steps behind him, so people would not think he was mentally defective. And when the owner of Vålstua came to the flat in Hoffsveien for the signing of the tenancy agreement he had asked her to go out so the man would not think he lived with his mother.

  They finished their cigarettes. He did not stay over.

  It was a light night. He left Oslo and drove back to the farm.

  * * *

  He had grown more aggressive since running out of steroids. It was a state he would be glad to recreate if the need arose, because it seemed to suppress fear very efficiently. He asked himself how he could manipulate his body into it. ‘I wonder if it is possible to acquire specialised “aggressiveness” pills on the market. It would probably be extremely useful in select military operations, especially when combin
ed with steroids and ECA stack…! It would turn you into a superhuman one-man army for two hours!’ he wrote.

  The next day he dug up the Pelican case, which he had buried in the woods in a spot plagued by mosquitoes where nobody would want to stay for long. With the car full of weaponry he drove back down the drive to Vålstua and waved to his neighbour, who had just started to harvest the crop of timothy and clover.

  On the days that followed, he got his equipment ready. He replaced the hollow-tipped bullets with lead-tipped ones – ‘the most suitable for the purpose of inflicting maximum damage to vermin’, because the hollow tips did not always expand as they were supposed to. He also packed a case of the clothes he would be wearing. He had got hold of a long-sleeved compression top from a sportswear supplier and sewn a police badge onto it. The black top had some yellow stitching, but he went over it with black felt pen. He discovered he had already packed in his case a load of Winstrol, the steroids known as Russians. Good, that meant he had more than he had thought. He also had some ECA stack in there, a combination of ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin. ‘I realise that if I am apprehended with all this equipment I will have serious problems trying to explain the intended usage…’

  He prepared the bags of ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminium, and shifted them from the spider cellar to the workbench in the barn. He felt something tickling his nose and screamed when he discovered a big black spider inside his mask. He was usually very careful to check there were no creepy-crawlies in his gloves, clothing and mask, but this one had sneaked in undetected.

  Outside, the neighbour was still at it. He had said it would take six hours to cut the clover, but he had taken three days so far. It was holding things up at the farm. The nitromethane that Breivik now had to mix in to the powdered aluminium was highly explosive and he was not keen to do that indoors. When would the wretched neighbour be finished?

  ‘You’re not to come without ringing first,’ Breivik yelled when he found the neighbour standing in the yard one day.

  ‘That won’t work if I’m to look after your fields,’ the neighbour retorted angrily. Here in the country, you just popped by. If you saw that your neighbour was in then you told him what your business was.

  The city boy always locked the door after him. He kept the curtains closed.

  * * *

  The first ANFO bomb was made by students at the University of Wisconsin in 1970, in protest against the university collaborating with the authorities during the Vietnam War. A physics researcher was killed. Later the IRA, ETA and al-Qaida all followed the same instructions. They were also used by Timothy McVeigh in 1995, when 168 people were killed in Oklahoma City.

  Anders had studied them all.

  What remained now was to blend the ammonium nitrate – the artificial fertiliser – with the aluminium powder, which would intensify the force of the explosion. It made a terrible amount of dust. He was covered all over in aluminium dust, which spread with him wherever he went. He had a special set of clothes and shoes to wear inside the barn. He had bought a protective suit from a British professor of mathematics who was selling off surplus stock, but he could never bring himself to use it; he got so hot and sticky when he was hard at work. One day, when Anders had been working for six solid hours and had just gone inside to get something to eat, the neighbour turned up in the yard again. Breivik’s face was covered in shimmering powdered aluminium and his hair was striped with grey. He hurried to the sink and rinsed off his face, but there was no time to do anything about his hair.

  ‘If you like, I’m happy to clear away the stones from your field so you can start growing your vegetables,’ suggested the neighbour, standing on the doorstep. He also offered to apply the fertiliser so the land was ready for cultivation. He could hire a couple of men and have it done within a week. Breivik had already bought the fertiliser, hadn’t he?

  ‘I’ve changed my plans,’ Breivik replied tersely, and sent the neighbour away. Later that evening, when he was watching another episode of True Blood, a car with four men drove into the yard.

  The neighbour must have realised what he was up to with the fertiliser and tipped them off!

  It was only four Poles looking for work.

  Actually, he would have loved to have the Poles to help him mix the fertiliser with the aluminium powder; it was hard going. One little bag in two hours! He considered using the electric cement mixer he had bought second-hand. But he was worried that the friction of the motion and the contact with the metal could cause the mixer to short-circuit. In the worst-case scenario, this could generate sparks, which might cause a detonation. But all the same, mixing by hand was so time-consuming that he had to risk it. If he was going to pull off this operation he would have to at least halve the time required for mixing. ‘In any case; let me die another day…’ he wrote in the log.

  It turned out to work without any problems. As usual he had been far too concerned about safety, he concluded. The mixer was not particularly efficient, however. It left lots of lumps and he still had to use his hands, but now he was able to log a rate of ninety minutes per bag, with the aim of reducing it to sixty. Even so, it was hard work for just one person and he was starting to understand why Timothy McVeigh had only made a 600-kilo bomb. He must have come up against the same problems and learned the hard way. The tenant at Vålstua nonetheless felt he had slowed down over the past week, and resolved to pick up the pace.

  He had now been at the farm for seventy days. On 1 June he hired a van from Avis, went shopping and apologised for it in his log.

  ‘Considering the fact that I am currently working on the most dreadful task, I bought a lot of exquisite food and candy today.’ He had to recharge his batteries and boost his morale before returning to his strenuous mixing work every morning. ‘Good food and candy is a central aspect of my reward system, which keeps me going. It has proven efficient so far.’ Whenever he was dreading a task, be it extreme hard labour or something involving risk of injury or death, he downed a can of Red Bull, a noXplode shake or an ECA stack to help him cope with throwing himself into the job.

  Mixing powdered aluminium, microballoons and fertiliser was the worst task so far. The dust even stuck to the inside of his mask, because he had run out of filters. Once he got started he could not even take cigarette breaks. ‘I literally turn into the tin man, with a layer of aluminium dust all over me.’

  Towards the middle of July he started feeling sick and dizzy, and feared it could be the result of diesel poisoning. His work clothes had soaked up a lot of diesel. Such poisoning was not fatal, but it weakened you for a time and could lead to kidney failure. To counterbalance all the crap he had ingested these past months, he took vitamin and mineral pills with a herbal supplement that was supposed to strengthen the liver and kidneys. He felt worse and worse, and decided to wear the protective suit while mixing the last four bags. He should have done this from the start, because it turned out to work very well, apart from the fact that his T-shirt and boxers were drenched in sweat by the time he finished.

  Every day he took his dose of steroids and drank four protein shakes to build as much muscle as possible. It was important to have the physical advantage.

  On Friday 15 July he went to Rena to catch the train to Oslo, where he would pick up the hire car he had ordered. There were a few people at the station waiting for the 15.03 to Hamar, where you had to change if you were going to the capital. An elderly man on his way to Elverum to fetch a computer that had been in for repair was standing by himself on the platform.

  Anders went up to him and asked if the train was expected on time. He told the man he ran a farm near by. The train arrived. Anders boarded it, and the man got on behind him. As he was passing the young man hailed him and invited him to sit with him.

  Anders got straight to the point.

  ‘Islam is in the process of taking over Europe,’ he said. Muslims had been killing Christians throughout history. You could call it genocide.

  The elde
rly man listened with interest. The boy was bright and well read, he thought, though their taste in reading matter clearly differed. The man pointed out that many Muslims had also been also killed in the name of religion in the Crusades. He counted as a political veteran, he said, and told the younger man about taking part in the first demonstration against the Vietnam War, in Los Angeles in 1964.

  ‘So you must be a communist!’ exclaimed Anders. He was a Christian himself, he said.

  The man replied that one should love one’s neighbour and follow Jesus’s example. Breivik became evasive. He was not interested in Jesus and love and caring and stuff like that, he said.

  ‘I earned twenty-six million kroner before I was twenty-eight,’ he said, and now he was using the money to support people behind the scenes who would throw the Muslims out of Norway.

  As the train approached Elverum station, the old man stood up to get off but Anders grabbed him and held him. The man tried to twist free but failed, and the train pulled out of the station.

  The ticket collector came along and Anders released his grip. The old man hastily grabbed up his jacket and bag and followed the ticket collector. All he told him was that that he had not got off at Elverum when he was meant to. He could get off at Løten and take the train back to Elverum, he was informed. The old man went to the exit and stood by the door for the rest of the journey to be sure of getting off in time. He was about to do so when the young man passed him a scrap of paper. On it were a name, a Hotmail address and a telephone number.

  It was several hours until the next train back, so the old man ended up taking a taxi to Elverum. There he told friends about ‘that idiot’, as he called him. ‘There was something burning him up from inside,’ he said. ‘I could hardly believe he was on the loose.’ There was indeed something about the young man that made him hard to forget; the older man wondered whether he needed someone to talk to and rang the number. A little girl answered. He apologised and tried again. The same little girl answered. Oh well. Wrong number. Anders had actually written down his real number, but the man had read the zeros as sixes. He never tried to reach Anders at the other address he’d written down: anders.behring@hotmail.com.