One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (39 page)

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 holster 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.

By then, Breivik was already on his way
out of Møllergata, where he turned right to drive down to the sea and into the Opera Tunnel, where the motorway ran under the fjord. He set the van’s GPS to the coordinates he had programmed in when he was examining the hull of the MS
Thorbjørn
.

The security guard in the government quarter decided to ring the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to ask for the name and telephone number of the
van’s owner. That was what they usually did, so they could ring the driver and ask him to move his vehicle.

*   *   *

A young man came up the little access way from Møllergata towards the fountain at Einar Gerhardsen’s Square. He was wearing a white shirt and had a laptop case slung across his back. The young lawyer was not at work today, but he had just finished a report on customs agreements
between the EU and the developing world and wanted to show it to his team. ‘Just email it,’ said his colleague in the legal department, but Jon Vegard Lervåg wanted to hand it over in person, so he could wish everybody a good summer holiday at the same time. He had just got married, and over the weekend he and his young wife would be going home across the mountains to the coastal town of Ålesund
to tell their parents the good news – they were expecting their first child.

The man crossed Grubbegata. He was fit and agile, an active hill runner who favoured the steep mountains of Western Norway. He was thirty-two, the same age as the man who had just left the government quarter and was now on his way to the motorway tunnel. They were born in the same month of the same year; only four days
separated them. Four days and infinity.

Jon Vegard Lervåg was a member of a group of law-clinic volunteers and of Amnesty International. Anders Behring Breivik was a member of the Knights Templar and Oslo Pistol Club. Jon Vegard, who was a competent classical guitarist, was looking forward to a Prince concert the following evening and to his trip home on Sunday. He was looking forward to becoming
a father in February. Four days separated them, and eternity.

As Jon Vegard came abreast of the van it exploded into a sea of flame. He was thrown sideways by a pressure wave so powerful that he was killed instantly, even before the splinters of glass and metal hit him.

The time was 15.25.22.

Two young women, lawyers at the Ministry who were standing behind the van, were also lifted into the
air by the pressure wave, engulfed in the sea of flame and thrown to the ground. They too were killed instantly. Two receptionists in the Tower Block were thrown out of their seats, over the counter and out into the square. Glass blew into the building, doors were smashed, window ledges became jagged spears of wood and shards of metal red-hot knifepoints. Everything was hurled either into the building
or out over the square, street and fountain, where eight now lay dead or dying. Around them lay numerous injured people, knocked unconscious by the pressure wave or with deep cuts.

Sheets of paper descended. Gently, almost floating in the wind, they fluttered down over the scene of destruction.

Fragments of Jon Vegard’s body flew through the air and spread along the façade of the Tower Block.
Only one hand landed intact on the ground. On one of his fingers his wedding ring remained unscathed.

*   *   *

‘What was that?’ said the Prime Minister when he heard the bang.

Jens Stoltenberg was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone. That morning, he had decided to work from his residence in Parkveien, behind the Royal Palace. It was the holiday period and quiet, so there had been no
need to go into the office in the Tower Block. He was preparing the speech he would be making on Utøya the next day. Its theme was the economy and the fight for full employment. His pet subjects.

When the bang came, he was on the phone to the president of the Parliament, Dag Terje Andersen, who was in a forest down south. Thunder, thought the Prime Minister; the forecast was for stormy weather.

They carried on talking.

*   *   *

A secretary from the Prime Minister’s office was in the reception area when the bomb went off. She was killed instantly by the pressure wave. Outside Stoltenberg’s door in the Tower Block lay one of his security guards, knocked unconscious, while the PM’s communications adviser ran out of his office on the fifteenth floor when the windows blew in. Blood was
dripping onto his shoes. He put a hand to his head and his fingers turned red. There was a deep gouge across the back of his head and blood was welling through his copper-coloured hair. He ran back into the wreckage of the office for something to staunch the bleeding. He found a T-shirt in a bag and pressed it to the wound.

As he ran down the stairs he rang the Prime Minister on his direct line.
‘Hi, it’s Arvid. Are you okay?’

‘Yes,’ said Stoltenberg. He still had Andersen on the other line.

‘You’re not hurt?’

‘No…’

As Arvid Samland made his escape down the partially dark, wrecked stairwell he told the Prime Minister what he could see. He and various other employees were trying to get out of the building. There was smoke and thick dust everywhere, fallen masonry and fittings were
blocking sections of the steps and splinters of glass covered the staircase where Picasso’s sand-blasted lines hung undamaged.

Beneath the block, the security guard had held the phone in his hand and was about to dial the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency when the bang came. The ceiling shuddered, all the monitors went black, lights and alarms started flashing, and water pipes sprang leaks.
He rang the Oslo police district instead, and was thus the first person to alert them to the explosion.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people were running away from the Tower Block. Smoke was gushing out of the building and several storeys were on fire; the building could collapse at any moment or there could be another explosion. Others just stood there gaping. Or they got out their phones and rang
home.

The security guard who had alerted the police stayed in front of his screens. He found his way back to the pictures of the van that had parked six minutes earlier. As soon as he had viewed the recording again, he rang the police for a second time.

‘It’s a vehicle that exploded,’ he said, and told them about a man wearing a dark uniform who left the van minutes before it blew up.

*   *
   *

Three guards came into the Prime Minister’s office in Parkveien, put him into a bulletproof vest and ordered him to follow them to a secure room. The fact that the attack in the centre had been directed at the government building meant it was possible the Prime Minister’s residence could also be a target.

Still, no armed guards were directed to protect the building.

*   *   *

Breivik had
the radio on as he drove. He had not heard any blast.

Something had gone wrong; the fuse had not detonated the explosives. It had failed!

The Crafter should have blown up long since, he thought as the traffic came to a standstill in the Opera Tunnel.

A few hundred metres from Hammersborg, however, the Pelican cases had gone crashing over in the back of the van. Perhaps the explosion had happened
just then, and he had not heard it because of the noise? Or … it occurred to him, perhaps it was actually the air pressure from the explosion that had made the cases fall over.

He drove on. Turned up the radio. A few minutes later the broadcast was interrupted with the news that there had been an explosion in the government quarter.

Yes! It had gone off.

*   *   *

The first police car reached
the scene three minutes after the explosion. Ten ambulances were also dispatched. Several passers-by stopped to give first aid. Oslo University Hospital was put on major incident alert and the accident and emergency department prepared for many admissions. One of the firemen sent to the government quarter was Magnus, Anders’s childhood friend, the one who had just called him at the farm about
coming for a visit, who had worried, and wondered when his friend would emerge from his tunnel and be himself again.

Nine minutes after the explosion, a call came through on the police public hotline.

‘Er, hello, Andreas Olsen here. I’m ringing because I saw something very suspicious as I was going past the government quarter.’

The operator said she could not take his tip-off then and there,
and that it would be better if he called back. Olsen interrupted her and said he had observed a man in police uniform walking along with a pistol in his hand.

‘I’m sorry, you do realise I can’t take this now, but what’s your name?’

‘This is a concrete lead about a car,’ Olsen insisted. He was the pedestrian with the bunch of roses who had seen Breivik walking up from the government quarter.
He gave a brief account of what he had seen: a man with a crash helmet and pistol, who had ‘something strange about him’. The man had left the area unaccompanied and got into a grey van with the registration number VH 24605.

The operator had just read the report from the security guard in the basement of the Tower Block, and put the two pieces of information together. She realised this was an
important tip-off and noted it down on a yellow Post-it note.

She took the note with her to the joint operational centre and put it on the leader’s desk. Although the chief of operations was busy on the phone, the operator thought she had made eye contact with her. Her impression was that the supervisor had registered that the note was important.

She went out.

The note sat there.

While a Fiat
Doblò VH 24605 was stuck in the queue for the Opera Tunnel, the note sat there.

Untouched on the desk, in a room in chaos, it did not disturb anyone.

The Oslo police district did not have any shared alert procedures, so the chief of operations – who should have been leading the action – got out the telephone book. Once she had looked through the holiday rota detailing who was in charge of what
over the summer break, she started ringing staff members one by one. Instead of taking the lead at the joint operational centre and coordinating action with the incident commanders in the field, she gave priority to calling individual officers in for duty. In the acute phase there was hardly any contact between the chief of operations and the on-scene commanders in charge of the secure and rescue
operations in the government quarter.

Anders Behring Breivik was still in the queue to get into the Opera Tunnel. He was afraid the whole of Oslo was already shut off because of the bomb attack and that he would never get to the next phase of his plan.

Had he been the police chief, he would have blocked all the main arteries, he reasoned. Perhaps the security forces had already hermetically
sealed off the capital.

But no roadblocks were set up, no roads were closed. It was not even considered. No attempt was made to stop the escape of a potential perpetrator. All available manpower was deployed to the government quarter and the rescue work there, including the elite emergency response unit that went by the name of Delta.

In the chaos there was still nobody to pick up the yellow
note. None of the police on the streets were asked to look out for a Fiat Doblò delivery van with the registration number VH 24605, or a guard in a dark uniform in a civilian vehicle.