Red Zone

On a night at the end of July, a red line lights up on a monitor in the security operations room of a Sicilian energy plant. Ninety-six seconds of network silence. Nothing that should justify what happens next: within twenty-four hours, an emergency decree hands control of a strategic power grid to a private consortium incorporated eleven months earlier.

Dario Cali, the analyst who reads those logs first, notices a detail no one wants to see: the digital certificate meant to authorize the emergency response was signed an hour and sixteen minutes before the attack even began.

From that moment, Dario and investigative journalist Giulia Marino find themselves chasing a truth someone built eleven months in advance — an architecture of shell companies, politicians used as cover, and one simple, dangerous principle: whoever controls the emergency also controls who gets to stop it.

Red Zone is a technological thriller weaving together cybersecurity, energy geopolitics, and corporate power, grounded in real eastern Sicily — Priolo, Augusta, Siracusa — where critical infrastructure and private interests collide over the simplest, most dangerous question of all: who actually controlled the raw data?