Five years ago. Ray Koval (Clive Owen), an MI6 agent, meets Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts), a CIA agent, at a party in Dubai. He is unaware of her identity and seduces her. Claire drugs him and steals classified documents from him.
Three years later in Rome. Ray and Claire meet for the first time since Dubai and spend several days together at a posh hotel. They imagine leaving their government jobs for work in an intensely competitive area in the private sector. They contemplate using their skills in intelligence to enrich themselves. After exploring possibilities over several months, including companies vying for the market in double-crust pizza, they settle on cosmetics and personal hygiene. How they will turn their positions to their advantage is unclear even to them, but they will be ready when the opportunity presents itself.
Claire accepts a job in counter-intelligence at Burkett &amp; Randle. After more than a year, Ray takes a position in intelligence at Equikrom, where he will act as the handler and Claire as one of his agents.
Aware that Ray's new employer will be spying on him to assess his loyalty, he and Claire first practice how they will pretend to be meeting in New York for the first time since Dubai, reprising much of the dialog of their actual encounter in Rome. They are unaware that Claire's employers at Burkett &amp; Randle are spying on her and hear this rehearsal, which blows her cover. Burkett &amp; Randle CEO Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) decides to keep Claire in her job, even though she is a mole, and to manipulate her in his rivalry with Equikrom.
Claire and Ray, working as mole and handler, reprise the dialog yet again and, as they anticipated, Ray's employer is listening in and is persuaded that Ray is loyal.
Throughout the weeks that follow, Claire and Ray remain wary of one another. Both are experienced in double-dealing and despite their romantic connection and plans to escape with new identities once this operation is complete, neither is entirely free of the other's suspicion.
Tully makes a speech to his intelligence team, including Claire, that paints his company as the innovator defending itself from duplicity and theft. He underscores how the unannounced new product makes vigilance even more urgent. He and others in his organization plant information that they know she and the intelligence team at Equikrom will steal as they try to understand what that "major development" might be.
Claire provides a copy of this speech to Equikrom CEO Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti), who plots to steal whatever Burkett &amp; Randle has developed. His team, including Ray, devote themselves to stealing information from Burkett &amp; Randle's offices, in the course of which Ray seduces one of their travel office employees and he and several others visit a casino in the Bahamas.
Thanks to information from Ray, Claire is able to appear a hero to her employers, catching Equikrom's spying activities after the fact or preventing them in some measure in the Bahamas. Tully at Burkett &amp; Randle pretends to be impressed, thanks Claire for successfully defending the company's new product, and he reveals to her that it is a cure for baldness. She informs Garsik at Equikrom, who leaves for a shareholders meeting in Las Vegas expecting she will obtain the chemical formula and he will announce the new development to his shareholders before Burkett &amp; Randle goes public with the information.
Excitement builds as the Equikrom team, using Claire as their principal source inside their rival's offices, succeed in acquiring a copy of the formula. Claire and Ray rendezvous at the ZÃ¼rich Airport, each with a copy of the formula that they plan to sell to a Swiss company for $35 million. At the same time, Garsik tells his shareholders that they are in the final stages of testing for a product that cures baldness. The formula, the Swiss announce to Ray and Claire, is not what they think, just a harmless lotion. They in turn are disappointed, but impressed by how completely they were manipulated. They have only each other now, and a thank you bottle of champagne from Tully.
Who catches Equikrom's spying activities?
Claire