I am often asked the question: "Where do you get these ideas?" The truth is, reality is stranger and more complex than any fictional imagination. The novel "The Lost Prophecy" did not begin as an abstract idea on my desk, but rather as a perilous field investigation in the autumn of 1992.
At the time, I was living in Hanover, Germany, when I received a call from "Klaus". My relationship with Klaus was not an ordinary working relationship; he was a man whose judgment I trusted. His voice carried a mixture of sorrow and determination when he said: "Henry, it's about my friend Johan... I think the time has come."
The story of Johan and Klaus goes back a long way. Klaus's father and Johan were friends living in the same city before the war, and they served together in the army, even if they were separated by fronts and locations. Days passed, conditions changed, and an entire generation departed, but Klaus the son remained loyal to his father's memory, regularly visiting his old friend, whom he considered a second father.
As the years advanced, Johan grew old, disease ravaged his body, and he felt his end approaching. In a moment of clarity preceding the end, he summoned Klaus to confess a heavy burden he had kept locked in his chest for fifty years. As soon as Klaus heard the details of the secret, he realized the matter was beyond his individual capabilities. He decided to contact me immediately, knowing full well my passion for such historical facts, and his certainty that I was the only person capable of providing the necessary resources and utilizing my connections to help uncover this mystery.
We didn't hesitate for a moment. The three of us set off in my car from Hanover. The journey was a race against time and Johan's deteriorating memory.
Upon arriving at the target city, a shock awaited us. Urban expansion had shown no mercy to history. Johan stood before a towering residential building and said with a trembling voice: "The first box... was here." It was now under tons of concrete and steel. We moved to the second location, only to find a commercial skyscraper had swallowed the land and everything beneath it.
Hope hung by a thin thread. We headed to the third and final coordinates. Here, fortunately, time had paused slightly. The third location had not turned into a building; rather, it was situated in a landscaped green space directly facing a modern government building.
The problem wasn't just the building, but the fact that this last location was about five hundred meters away from a local police station. A distance that might seem far to some, but it was not far enough to allow us to dig and extract a box from a depth of two meters without raising suspicions.
We stood there helpless, fearing the loss of our last chance. The situation seemed impossible, and we were about to retreat, when a small metal sign at the edge of the green space caught my attention. I approached it to read: "Designated Seasonal Camping Area."
At that moment, an idea flashed in my mind. I turned to them and said firmly: "We won't dig today. We will return on the weekend." The plan required turning an illegal extraction operation into an innocent family picnic.
I returned to Hanover, brought my equipped van, and rented another vehicle for Klaus. To complete the scene of "two families", I asked my personal secretary and a friend of hers to accompany us, after telling them a small part of the story to ensure their cooperation.
We set off at dawn on Friday and arrived at the camping area before anyone else. This timing was crucial; it allowed us to choose the exact spot. We parked the two vehicles facing each other to form a screen, then set up two large tents. I personally made sure that one of the tents was pitched directly over the digging spot identified by Johan, so the tent would become the cover under which we would work away from prying eyes.
The day passed very slowly. With the sunset, other cars began to arrive, and the place became crowded with the noise of families and the smell of barbecue. This was the right moment. We turned up the music in our camp to drown out any sound our pickaxes might make, and the work began.
Inside the closed tent, the air was stifling and heavy. Klaus and I took turns digging. The ground was hard and saturated with ancient plant roots. An hour passed, then a second, sweat pouring from us, until my pickaxe struck something solid. A muffled metallic sound.
We brushed the dirt away with our hands, and the box appeared. It was a rectangular metal box, about a meter long, dark gray, its corners corroded by rust and moisture. It looked like a small coffin. On its top cover, despite the corrosion, the "Reich" eagle was still clearly engraved, clutching a swastika in its talons, and sealed with hardened red wax that hadn't been touched in fifty years.
We didn't dare open it there. With great difficulty, we lifted the heavy box, wrapped it in a blanket, and quickly moved it into my van. We then returned to fill the hole, doing our best to level it and cover it with some gear. We left the camp at dawn, before anyone woke up.
In the basement of my house, in the presence of Johan who looked as if his soul had been restored, we broke the seals and opened the box. We didn't find gold or jewelry. We found something far more dangerous. We found documents.
The documents inside were not military plans; they were a terrifying blueprint for what the documents called the "Future Project" (or Memory Engineering). The box contained hundreds of pages of forged diaries of soldiers who were never born, and fabricated letters carefully planted to exonerate specific individuals, aiming to deceive future historians.
I sat down afterward, enthusiastic about writing the novel, but I didn't have all the threads. The documents were "cold", time had changed, and I couldn't rely entirely on Johan's memory to build the human plot. Amidst this thinking, at the dawn of 1993, I remembered a story my father used to tell me in my childhood about a close friend of his whom I hadn't met in a long time, a man named "Ephraim Rosenfeld."
The story my father told was something unimaginable in its planning, sacrifice, and loyalty, to the point that I doubted it was real. But I gathered my courage and called Mr. Ephraim, not knowing if he was alive or had passed away.
Fortunately for me, he was the one who answered. He seemed very happy I called, and said my voice reminded him of my father. I asked to meet him, and he invited me to join him for lunch the next day.
I went to him, and inspired by those documents we extracted from deep underground, and from the heart of my conversation with Mr. Ephraim at the lunch table, I began writing the very first lines of the novel "The Lost Prophecy".