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At high school he began speculating in shares, and one day made two hundred thousand kroner in a single transaction. It inspired him to carry on trading in shares, and he took an increasing number of days off. As time went by he hardly had time to attend classes, and just before Christmas in his final year he sent a letter to the school.

I hereby give notice that after serious consideration I have decided to leave the third year. Thank you for an instructive time at the school. In brackets underneath he wrote: P.S. (Just a joke) If I had not had to do French I would be staying on.

His mother was upset when he told her what he had done. He’d grown so headstrong lately, she said, and she was worried about his future. He’d always had good grades, often top marks, so why leave just six months before his final exams? But her eighteen-year-old had urgent things to attend to, and school was slowing him down.

He told his mates he didn’t want a boss above him, creaming off the profits. He told his own boss he wanted to leave his job in telephone sales and set up his own business. That was where the money was. And while his fellow students were choosing their universities or colleges, he put all his energy into becoming a millionaire.

Thanks to his little jobs and some hard saving, he had a starting capital of a hundred thousand kroner for the company, Behring & Kerner Marketing, that he was going to run with a friend. They had an office in the basement of the terrace in Konventveien into which Wenche and Anders had moved after Elisabeth emigrated to California. Anders’s business idea was inspired. He had told his former boss why he was leaving, to be sure, but he had pulled the wool over his eyes as well, because before leaving Telia he had got access to a database of foreigners in Norway, people he called ‘priority-A customers, the heavyweights’, and he had surreptitiously copied the database. Now he could ring round these customers and offer them cheaper call charges.

But it turned out not to be that easy to get rich overnight. Most customers were sceptical about being contacted by the two teenagers and stayed with Telia. Then Anders fell out with Kerner, later referring to him as incompetent. He vowed never again to start a business with a friend without sales experience. After a year he wound up the business, all his capital gone.

Anders went back to telephone sales. Before long he was promoted to team leader. By scrimping and saving, he slowly built up fresh starting capital. He had got a new idea. He wanted to set up databases of rich people, potential investors in industry and commerce, and then sell those databases to interested parties. But he was unable to find out how to locate the information he needed and had to shelve the idea.

Then he decided advertising was the thing: he was a seller, after all.

He set up a firm selling outdoor advertising space, aiming to undercut one of the big players. Clear Channel had contracts with landlords to display advertising round the city, but while the cost of hiring advertising space had risen significantly, payment to the property owners had remained static. His plan was to ring round to the owners and offer them slightly more than they were getting. But first he needed to get hold of the property and company numbers, and they were far from readily available. It cost money and they had to be retrieved from public offices.

One day when he was brooding on the matter he ran into Kristian, the neighbour whose parents had always given him a lift to football matches. After a brief chat in the street, Anders offered him a job in his one-man business and Kristian, bored with his own job, accepted.

They found affordable premises on Øvre Slottsgate in the offices of a law firm. The rent included use of the communal lunch room, where they shared a fridge with Geir Lippestad, the lawyer who owned the firm. Sometimes the boys ate their lunches with Lippestad, at the time representing the neo-Nazi Ole Nicolai Kvisler, who stood accused of murdering fifteen-year-old Norwegian-Ghanaian Benjamin Hermansen in an Oslo suburb. Anders in particular was interested in talking to the lean, balding lawyer about the case.

Anders was busy making contacts and building networks. He dreamt of joining the Masonic lodge and was trying to find someone who would propose him as a member, someone to suck up to, as his friends put it. Once in the lodge he would be among the elite, the way Anders saw it.

‘You’ve really got the knack of manipulating people!’ his new partner said admiringly. Kristian was impressed by his associate’s talent for getting what he wanted. Anders had been given access to the computers at the municipal Agency for Planning and Building Services and had copied everything he needed, entirely free of charge. That was a good start. Even so, the project ran out of money after a year, and it wasn’t long before the rent and telephone bills were going unpaid. Anders sold the business to a company that dealt in billboards on a large scale, and emerged with the same sum of money he had started out with. Breaking even. Kristian, for his part, decided to work for the company that had bought them out, and the two boys parted.

Anders had come up with a new way of getting rich. Advertising placards could also be mobile. Then you didn’t have to pay anything for the site, because the street was free. He planned to take on an unemployed academic to cycle round the city with placards fixed to a trailer. He made a prototype in the basement at home and negotiated a contract with Platekompaniet, a chain of music and DVD stores. The contraption was sent out on its rounds but the construction was not solid enough and the placard blew over on the first day, injuring a woman. The business folded, having generated no income.

Anders’s friends made a joke of the fact that he had insisted on an unemployed academic to ride the bike. As if to make the point that education was good for nothing. Anders, who had not taken his final exams at upper secondary, boasted that he had studied enough to use the title Bachelor of Small Business and Management, and that he had completed the entire syllabus of the MBA course.

At this time he was also taking part in the Progress Party’s course in preparation for political office. The first evening focused on ideology and, according to the programme, ‘the big names in what today we call liberalism, such as John Locke, Adam Smith and Ayn Rand’. The next session covered the history of the Progress Party, and on the third evening the aspiring politicians had to give lectures on topical party issues. In addition, they were taught how to spread the message, which felt like home ground to Anders. Selling was his forte, after all. He had just had a bit of bad luck.

Oh, it was that irresistible urge to get rich…

He conscientiously attended all the meetings of the Oslo West branch. They laid plans for various activities leading up to the Oslo City Council elections in 2003. But turnout at the meetings was poor, and not much came of it all. He and Thomas Wist-Kirkemo did not get on particularly well. Thomas felt he wasn’t really getting through to his deputy and invited him out for a couple of beers to get to know him.