One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

From Mari Siljebråten’s tent came the sound of laughter, while Anders Kristiansen, who was on supervision duty that night, tried to hush them all.

  But without success. This was Utøya, after all.

  As the night wore on it started raining harder. Lovers’ Path emptied. Everyone sought refuge from the downpour.

  Heavy raindrops beat on the tent canvas. Water seeped in through zips and vents, it soaked up through ground pads and into sleeping bags, which clung round the young bodies like wet wrappings.

  Raindrops from the same clouds pelted down on the magnolias and unripe plums at the garden centre. They drummed on the roofs of the two vans parked outside.

  But the mixture of fertiliser, diesel and aluminium lay dry and ready. The fuse nestled softly in a mattress.

  Friday

  The Commander of the Norwegian anti-communist resistance movement donned a brown Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Over that went a striped Lacoste jersey in subdued, earthy colours. He put on dark trousers and Puma trainers. In the kitchen he made three cheese and ham sandwiches. He ate one of them and put the others in a bag.

  Back in his room he brought out a Telenor box with a new modem in it. He had bought the fastest one available. But it took time to install. First he had to go into Outlook and click his way through various procedures, and then restart the machine. At half past eight he sent himself an email from behbreiv@online.no with the title line Test first time. Hello, Best regards, AB.

  The modem worked.

  He prepared to send out the film he had compiled out of snippets and short videos from the internet, plus the all-important 2083. A European Declaration of Independence. He had already keyed the eight thousand email addresses into the computer. All he had to do was press Send. But they couldn’t get the email just yet. No one was to open the document until he was about to set off.

  ‘I’m going to the computer shop,’ he told his mother when he was ready. ‘I need a couple of spare parts.’

  That was his goodbye.

  His mother said she was going out too. She’d take the tram into the city centre.

  ‘Will you be having dinner here with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he replied. He had told her he would stay until Sunday.

  She planned to make spaghetti bolognese because Anders had always liked that. And then maybe they could have a nice snack later in the evening, like prawns and white bread.

  Outside there was hardly a soul to be seen. It was raining, the sky was grey. The garden centre had just opened and there were only a few cars parked in front. He unlocked the Doblò, pushed aside the mattress in the cardboard box and took out the fuse. Then he got into the back of the Crafter to mount it on the explosives. With an angle grinder he had made a hole from the cab through to the load compartment so he could set off the detonation without getting out of the van. The fuse was held in place with tape, running back from the cab so it would not curl round on itself and catch fire, but burn down all the way into the charge itself.

  He left the Crafter and its bomb parked at the garden centre, where they were advertising a special offer on thuja hedging. He locked the van and got into the Doblò, which was loaded with the Pelican case with all his equipment: handcuffs, plastic strip cuffs, a water bottle, his rifle, shotgun and ammunition. He drove through the deserted streets towards the city centre. He parked in the square at Hammersborg torg, just above the government quarter. He made sure to put plenty of money into the meter and leave his parking ticket clearly visible in the front windscreen. Then he took a brisk turn through the government quarter to check no new roadblocks had been put in place. Under his arm he had a black leather attaché case. He was carrying it so he blended into the setting, here in the bastion of bureaucracy. All the roads were as open and accessible as before. He passed the flower sellers at Stortorget and hurried towards the cathedral, where he hailed a taxi.

  ‘When do people who work in the government offices tend to leave in the holiday period?’ he asked.

  ‘The first ones start going home about two,’ replied the driver, a Pakistani in his forties.

  ‘Which building in Oslo do you think is the most politically significant?’ the passenger went on. The driver was just thinking about it when the man asked another question.

  ‘What would you say is the optimal route from Skøyen to Hammersborg torg?’

  It was half past twelve by the time he was back home in Hoffsveien.

  * * *

  At twenty to one, Gro Harlem Brundtland left the stage in the main meeting hall. She was hot and flushed after warming to her subject of the struggle for women’s rights. It was many years since she had last visited Utøya, an island she had first been to as a little girl, just after the war. On that visit, the seven-year-old had sneaked out of her room in the evening and gone down to the campfire where the grown-ups were sitting. Her father had pretended not to see her, and she had stayed and listened to the songs of the labour movement, the laughter and talk. This time, she had spoken about her political life and all that had changed since she was born in the late 1930s. The changes had not been without cost, the liberation campaign had come at a price, women had stood at the barricades, they had been ridiculed and excluded. Gro warned the young AUF girls to be alert to the possibility of a backlash. Equality was something that had to be fought for every day, both globally and in your daily life.

  Bano and Lara sat barefoot among hundreds of other young people in the damp, clammy hall and listened. Equality was one of the issues dearest to their hearts. They were particularly keen to make sure immigrant girls were fully included in society. The two sisters had had their own very physical experience of the limitations imposed on women. When they were on holiday in Kurdistan, they encountered restrictions of dress, behaviour and freedom of movement. They agreed that the struggle for equality should not stop at the Norwegian border.

  It was time for lunch. After that, Gro was to meet some of the girls who were candidates in the local council elections coming up in two months’ time. Akershus was one of the counties selected, and Bano was on the list of candidates for Nesodden!

  ‘How can we make ourselves heard?’ she asked.

  ‘Be yourself!’ said Gro. ‘No one will hear any of you otherwise, still less trust you. That’s the most important thing of all. If you’re not yourself you just can’t sustain it in the long term.’

  Bano was listening attentively. She was soaking wet, and on her feet she had a pair of pink flip-flops.

  When Gro had stepped ashore from the MS Thorbjørn in bright white trousers and new white trainers, in the most horrendous weather she had ever experienced on Utøya, one of the reception party on the jetty decided footwear like that would not survive the day. He asked the retired doctor her shoe size.

  Then the cry went up: ‘Find a pair of size 38 rubber boots!’

  ‘She can have mine,’ came a croaky voice from inside a tent. It was Bano, who instantly pulled off her green boots and put on her bright pink flip-flops instead.

  She had rung home: ‘Mum! Gro’s got my wellies on!’

  They kept Gro dry. Meanwhile, the young people on Utøya got wetter and wetter. The campsite below the café building turned into a mudbath and few of the tents could withstand the rain that forced its way through the canvas and dripped in on rucksacks, sleeping bags and changes of clothes. On the football pitch and by the volleyball net the grass was no longer green but dirty brown with trampled-in soil and mud. The football tournament had to be postponed because the pitch was not fit to play on. People had come to hear Gro in their last set of dry clothes. Eventually the hall grew so sweaty and sticky that they had to open the windows onto the rain outside.

  Bano rang her mother again after the meeting with the former Prime Minister.

  ‘I talked to Gro, Mum, I talked to a living legend!’

  ‘But Bano, you’ve scarcely any voice!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s such fun here,’ Bano exclaimed in return.

 
‘Try not to make yourself even worse. Do dress warmly,’ her mother begged. ‘And ask Gro to autograph your boots!’

  A TV reporter who had come over to Utøya with Gro asked the AUF girls what Gro meant to them.

  ‘She’s the best,’ answered Bano, standing in the rain in her rubber flip-flops.

  ‘Even better than Jens Stoltenberg?’

  Bano thought about it.

  ‘Well, if this was a rock festival and they were bands, Gro’s name would be top of the bill, with Jens underneath,’ she laughed croakily.

  I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Fri July 22nd, 12.51.

  Sincere regards,

  Andrew Berwick, Justiciar Knight Commander.

  He was back in the fart room after his taxi-ride home, and was about to send out the film and his manifesto. But the computer kept on getting stuck. Then it stopped working altogether, before he had managed to send anything. Finally the file began to move, the marker creeping forward. It seemed to have sent to some people at least, but then it got stuck again and he had to restart the computer.

  A feeling of panic spread through his body. So many years of planning, and then it went wrong!

  He stared at the screen.

  At last the machine cranked itself up and started sending.

  Western Patriot, read the heading. Then he introduced the work as a set of ‘advanced ideological, practical, tactical, organisational and rhetorical solutions and strategies’.

  I do not want any compensation for the work as it is a gift to you, as a fellow patriot. In fact, I ask only for one favour of you: I ask that you distribute this book to everyone you know. Please do not think that others will take care of it. Sorry to be blunt, but it does not work that way. If we, the Western European Resistance fail or become apathetic, then Western Europe will fall, and your liberties with it …

  He checked the time.

  The email with The Islamisation of Western Europe and the Status of the European Resistance Movements in the subject line must have got through to at least some of the addresses? All the staff would soon be leaving the government quarter.

  He had planned to destroy the hard disk after sending off the manifesto, but now he would have to leave the machine working away without him.

  He got ready to leave the room. The computer, the two safes, Coderock on the walls, the light blue wardrobe, the single bed. At a quarter to three he went out of his room, turned left, opened the front door and slammed it shut behind him.

  In the fart room, the computer and modem droned on. Once the manifesto had been sent to a thousand email addresses, everything ground to a halt. Telenor’s spam filter had detected that the upper limit for the number of messages that could be sent per day had been reached.

  On the screen, a window was open in the web browser. It showed the day’s programme for the AUF on Utøya.

  Down to the junction, along past the old industrial buildings of the electrical plant, past the bronze statue of a naked girl with her arms in the air. He briskly covered the ground on his usual route to the garden centre. He did not meet anyone he knew.

  He unlocked the van and climbed into the back. Inside were the strong plastic bags from China in which he had packed the explosives. He got changed beside the bomb. Off came Ralph Lauren, Lacoste and Puma. He pulled the black compression top over his head and fixed the plastic police insignia onto the sleeves, then strapped on the bulletproof vest. He pulled on the black trousers with the reflective strips and fastened the pistol holster to his thigh. Lastly, he put on the heavy black boots with spurs at the heels.

  Before opening the van door to get out, he looked round carefully. This was a moment of vulnerability. If anyone saw him getting out of the back of the van in full police uniform, they might start to wonder. But he saw nobody. Skøyen seemed deserted on that chilly grey Friday in July; most people round here were away at their summer cottages or holiday homes. He closed the back door, went round the side of the vehicle and climbed into the driving seat.

  At just the same time, Gro was taking a seat in the cabin aboard the MS Thorbjørn to leave the island. Beside her sat her granddaughter Julie, daughter of her late son Jørgen. Julie was active in the AUF and had wanted to stay on after Gro’s address, but with the weather turning ever wetter she decided to go home with her grandmother. With them was the parliamentarian Hadia Tajik, the young woman of Pakistani origin who once had given Bano a course on rhetoric. She had come over to hear Gro speak, and left with her in the horrendous weather.

  Gro got away. She got off the boat at the jetty on the mainland, where her car stood waiting.

  * * *

  Anders Behring Breivik took the same route he had taken earlier in the day. On the way to the E18 there was a traffic jam. A tractor had driven off the road at the exit to the Viking ship museum, and part of the road was blocked off, with two uniformed police officers in attendance.

  He looked straight ahead. Think if they spotted his police uniform at the wheel of the grey van! They would stop him and notice his fake insignia. Then it would all be over before it had started.

  But it wasn’t.

  He drove past the roadblock.

  It continued.

  In the city centre he turned into Grubbegata, which was a one-way street with government buildings on both sides. It was seven years since the authorities had taken the decision to close it. But the measure had done so many bureaucratic rounds that it had still not been implemented. At a quarter past three he stopped outside the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs. He got out and put the blue light on top of the van. He climbed back in; he was scared.

  He could simply leave it. Just drive past.

  He started the van. And drove calmly towards the Tower Block.

  By his calculations, the fuse would take six minutes to set off the bomb. Plenty of time to get away, but also time for somebody to cut it and prevent detonation. Ought he to light it right away, several hundred metres from the building? He could not decide. And then he was there.

  There were no barriers to prevent the van driving right up to the seventeen-storey building that housed the Ministry of Justice and the Prime Minister’s office. There was a No Entry sign hanging on a chain between two pillars, but there was plenty of space to drive round it.

  When he turned up towards the reception area, he saw that there were a couple of cars blocking the ideal place to park. To maximise the pressure wave in one direction he had packed the 950-kilo bomb so there were several hundred kilos more explosive on one side. The two cars would force him to park the other way round. The explosive force would blast outwards from the building, rather than into it.

  The aim was to make the building collapse. He had calculated that if he managed to destroy the first row of the pillars holding up the building, the whole thing would come down. The Prime Minister’s office at the top and everything below it.

  He parked right outside the reception area, close to the building. Fear was starting to take a grip. His hands were shaking. To try to suppress the fear and calm himself down he focused on the plan, which he had run over in his head hundreds of times. He had seen the sequence of events unfold in his mind over and over again. Now he had to rely on his training and stick to the plan.

  He took out his lighter. His hands continued to shake. Still seated at the wheel, he turned and reached backwards to light the fuse protruding through the hole from the load compartment.

  The fuse caught light immediately, emitting sparks. It crackled its way towards the bags of fertiliser.

  Now there was no way back.

  He had been braced to die the instant he lit the fuse. The Analfo gas could escape through the hole and make the van explode. Slightly nonplussed when this did not happen, he grabbed his keys and got out, forgetting his mobile phone on the dashboard. He locked the car and looked round. Planning the operation, he had imagined that armed agents would come running up and he would have to kill them. But nobody came. He still undid the ho
lster on his thigh, took out Mjølnir and crossed the road with the pistol in his right hand.

  * * *

  The lower basement level, two floors below the Tower Block, was where the security control centre was located. From there, a couple of security guards monitored the government quarter via multiple screens. The guards did not notice the van parked by the exit.

  A few minutes after Breivik lit the fuse, one of the receptionists in the Tower Block informed them there was a wrongly parked van outside the entrance. One of the guards rewound the film from the relevant camera back a few minutes and pressed play. He watched the images of a van slowly driving up and saw a uniformed man, whom he assumed to be some guard, leave the van and disappear from the screen.

  They were used to illegal parking. Delivery vehicles were often parked in the wrong place, as were the cars of people popping in on brief business. According to the regulations, the reception parking area was only for the use of official cars collecting or dropping off the Prime Minister and his ministers. But the rule was not enforced.

  Off camera, roadworks obliged the uniformed man to cross over to the opposite pavement. There he met a young man with a bunch of red roses. The man gave the police officer a curious look and the pistol caught his eye.

  Breivik swiftly weighed up whether the man in front of him was a security agent who would have to be shot. He decided he was a civilian and let him live.

  They passed each other and then each turned round to look back, their eyes meeting. They both walked on, and turned again. By then, Breivik had his visor down.

  The man with the roses slowed almost to a halt. He was surprised to see the police officer get into a delivery van. It was also rather odd that he drove out into Møllergata against the flow of traffic. In fact, so strange that he got out his mobile and tapped in the van’s make and registration number – Fiat Doblò VH 24605 – before he went on.

  Down in the security control centre, the duty officer was using the cameras to try to locate the driver. He seemed to have gone in the direction of the Ministry of Education. But the cameras there revealed nothing. The guard switched his attention back to the illegally parked van and zoomed in on the number plate.