One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (32 page)

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 put 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.

But it was still a long time until July.

The Chemist’s Log

Maybe it was the sulphur vapour, maybe it was the steroids, but he had grown more careless, in fact almost fearless. It was tedious having to stand there keeping an eye on the boiling sulphuric acid. This was the third day in a row he had been watching over it. He had to let it boil away for many hours and reach a concentration of more than 70% before it started to give off
the dense black smoke; now he didn’t bother waiting until nightfall. The acid followed its own rhythm and took no account of night or day.

The fridge was empty and he needed to do some shopping. But he could not afford to waste valuable boiling time by turning off the hotplate. He was behind schedule, so decided to take a chance and briefly desert the bubbling acid. He could turn the hotplate
to a low setting, after all. He was in the hallway putting on his lab gear and protective goggles to go out and turn the temperature down when he glanced out of the window. A neighbour was outside.

He tore off the apron and calmly went out.

‘Good morning,’ he said, cautiously cheerful.

The neighbour asked about a BMW. The farm owner, the one who was in prison, had a car in the upper barn and
the neighbour had promised to fix it for him by the time he got out.

That really was close. He was still shaking as he tried to make a genial impression, chatting and giving the neighbour enough petrol to drive the car away.

Later he advised the readers of his log: you ought to try to generate as much goodwill as possible from your neighbours. ‘The goodwill will be returned indirectly by them
not probing and investigating. If you get visits from neighbours, be polite and friendly, offer them sandwiches and coffee, unless it will jeopardise the operation.’

It seemed like too much of a risk to leave the sulphuric acid boiling while he was out after all, so he postponed operations until the evening. He had to buy food, so he went into the village and bought red meat, bread and sweets,
and made himself a large meal when he got back to the farm. Once it was dark he went outside, and in the course of the night he reduced all the sulphuric acid.

The following day he went to Oslo to fetch some packages. The post office had sent his mother notification of several parcels to be collected. He went back to the farm with distilled water, microballoons and a set of dumbbells.

Half an
hour from home, he gave a start when he saw a car parked at the side of the road. An unmarked police car, he thought. Closer to the farm he saw a car that could be another police vehicle. I’m about to be arrested, he thought. A short distance before the driveway to the farm, he turned off his engine and lit a cigarette. Was it all over now? There might already be a big police team waiting for him
at Vålstua. All his weapons were in the farmhouse. Should he flee? But where to?

Once he had stubbed out the cigarette he started the car and drove slowly along to the farm with his fog lights on, so he would have an advantage if the police were in front of him.

The barn door was standing wide open. Somebody was there! They doubtless had the place surrounded and were closing in on him, or perhaps
they were waiting in the main building. He got out of the car and approached the farmhouse. Locked himself in, fetched his Glock and searched the house and barn for surveillance equipment. Apart from the wind, all was quiet. Perhaps they had gone. Perhaps they had installed cameras.

‘Paranoia can be a good thing, or it can be a curse,’ he wrote in his diary. It must have been the wind that wrenched
the barn door open. He swore never to let paranoia get the better of him again. If they came to get him there was nothing he could do in any case, so there was no point worrying.

The tender growth in the surrounding countryside was greener and more intense with every passing day. The birds were on their nests and the cherry trees were in bloom. While there was lots of activity in the fields all
around, his own land lay fallow. Clover and timothy flourished in the rich soil, giving off a sweetish scent. Still, the smell of something rotten hung over the farm at Vålstua.

*   *   *

He had six tonnes of fertiliser. Half of it non-detonable, ordered so as not to arouse suspicion. Now, he was going to transfer three tonnes of it to fifty-kilo bags, pick them up with the forklift truck, take
them over to the barn and heave them on to a handcart, and then wheel them in. Though he had only managed to move a fraction of the fertiliser, he was exhausted after the first day.