The PC was still dead.
Two days later he made a test bomb and took it to a remote part of the forest, a few kilometres from the farm. There was still thunder in the air, which was good, because nobody would think twice about a loud bang. He lit the fuse and waited. ‘It was probably the longest ten seconds I have ever endured…’ he wrote afterwards.
The little lump exploded.
He drove off straight away, in case anybody came to investigate. He headed to Elverum to celebrate with a slap-up meal. He drove home via the detonation site to study the small crater. The DDNP had exploded as it should, but the dried picric acid had largely failed to detonate. He would have to purify it still further.
In mid-June his financial mask began to slip. Ten of his credit card bills were due and he had received formal reminders about various other amounts he owed. If it went as far as debt recovery and his creditworthiness was in doubt, he would not be able to hire a car and it would be well nigh impossible to carry out the plan. The biggest unpaid bill was for the fertiliser, but nor had he paid last month’s rent on the farm. The bills for the fume hood fan, the hotplate stirrer and the spare fan he had not even used were now due. He had just one week to find almost eighty thousand kroner. As well as withdrawing as much cash as he could from those ten credit card accounts, he would also have to ring the farming cooperative and ask for extra time to settle their bill.
He managed to defer payment for half the fertiliser, and wrote in his log that he could ‘keep my head above water until mid-July’.
His activities at Vålstua were extremely hazardous. The barn was full of chemicals, the liquids were unstable and his working process was experimental. He had scarcely any safety measures. Sometimes he freaked out when he read about security precautions and all the eventualities that could lead to explosions. Contact with air was dangerous; contact with metal, concrete and plastic could increase static electricity and cause a detonation. So could friction and impact, and proximity to petrol, diesel and electric sockets. He was scared of what would happen to him if the explosive material went off. ‘The blast wave/flame would probably cauterise my wounds, resulting in an extended and extremely painful death.’ He made sure to keep the Glock to hand in his working area, so if he survived an explosion but lost his arms he could still shoot himself in the head by pulling the trigger with his toes.
Everything was covered in a layer of grey aluminium powder. The strong fluids and acids were gradually staining and eating into the floors and furniture.
After a long night’s work towards the end of June, he woke up at eleven the next morning to find that he had received a text message. It was from the girlfriend of the convicted hash-grower and had been sent an hour and a half before. She wrote that she was on her way to pick up some stuff from the barn. In that case, she could be there within the half-hour.
It would take him at least twelve hours to clear up and make the barn presentable, dismantle his equipment, sweep up and clean the place. That meant he would have no choice but to kill her on arrival and then evacuate the farm. He rang her. Luckily she had not yet left. They arranged that she would come two days later. He used the two days for thorough cleaning and tidying. He had to move all the equipment down into the ‘spider cellar’ full of cobwebs, hide the damaged tabletops under cloths and the floors with rugs. It set him back by at least two days.
She arrived late in the evening and wanted to stay the night. Breivik got up early the next morning to check whether she was snooping round. If she got suspicious, he would have to kill her. She was hard to read, so when she had packed up and was ready to leave he offered her a bite to eat so he could try to glean a bit more about what she had seen.
He also tested out a few of the ideas from his book on her, but no, she did not want to discuss politics. He poured her more coffee. They chatted. She did not seem to have noticed anything. He could let her live.
The farm stank of chemicals: ‘it smells like fresh egg fart,’ he wrote in the log. He had to shut the windows to help the liquid reach room temperature more quickly and he worried about his health and everything he had inhaled.
Then his network interface card shorted again and he was without a PC. He ordered a new card and carried on with the production of DDNP. Once he had purified the last batch of picric acid, he went off to Elverum and bought three portions of Chinese takeaway, beef with noodles and fried rice. ‘Yummy! I took an early night as I didn’t have a PC.’
The next day he went to pick up the new network interface card and started paying bills. When he had paid nine out of the ten credit card bills there was another power cut and the computer short-circuited. Seconds later he heard a clap of thunder. ‘What the hell, not again!!! And it isn’t even raining!!’ How was it possible to be so unlucky, he asked in his log, just two hours after he had repaired the PC after the last stroke of lightning? He watched an episode of the TV series Rome and tucked into the last portion of Chinese takeaway to help him over his setback.
The following day he filtered crystals out of the picric acid. There were fewer than he had reckoned on. He had to be more accurate and decided to take some time out. He gave himself Sunday evening off to go to the Rena festival but did not think much of the choice of local foods on offer – organic kid meat, smoked sausage, crispbread, cheese and honey – so he took himself off to Elverum for some more Chinese takeaway.
‘There was a relatively hot girl in the restaurant today, checking me out,’ he wrote in the log afterwards. ‘Refined individuals like myself are a rare commodity here so I notice I do get a lot of attention. It’s the way I dress and look. They are mostly unrefined/uncultivated people living here. I wear mostly the best pieces from my former life, which consists of very expensive brand clothing, Lacoste sweaters, piqués etc. People can see from a mile away that I’m not from around here.’
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.