Protocol A9

'Protocol A9 - Obedience': the thriller that anticipated a real inquiry by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office.
A novel about the 'Years of Lead', about obedience, and about family silences - published just days before Italian judicial reality confirmed a strikingly similar story.When Davide Sorrentino sent the manuscript of Protocol A9 - Obedience to print, he could not have imagined that, in late February 2026, the Public Prosecutor's Office of Rome and the Military Prosecutor's Office would open a real inquiry into the illicit trafficking of strategic components that had vanished from an Italian base where an outside company held the maintenance contract: approximately 2,500 parts - including components from Tornado and AMX fighter-bombers and C-130 transport aircraft - with an estimated value of 17 million euros. Among those under investigation are senior Air Force officers and executives from the outside contractor."It isn't Danilo's story. But it could be," the author writes in the novel's concluding Author's Note, added just as the news was breaking. "And perhaps, somewhere, a curious student has just opened a parcel forgotten for thirty-five years."Protocol A9 - Obedience tells the story of Danilo, unwittingly recruited at eighteen into a network of secret deliveries linked to Italy's rogue secret services. For forty years, through a military service he did not choose, two failed marriages, and a life built on silence, Danilo carries out orders without asking questions - until a parcel forgotten in a safety-deposit box in Hanoi forces him to confront the truth about what he really delivered, and who used him."I have always believed that every story has its time," Sorrentino declares. "This one in particular carried me back to the 1980s that I thought I had all but forgotten - and I never thought that the news, forty years later, would prove me right with such precision."Set between Turin, Monza, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City, the novel spans four decades of Italian history - from the Years of Lead and Gladio to the present day - questioning a timeless theme: how much of our lives do we truly choose, and how much is simply imposed upon us in exchange for our silence.