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?’