Burn After Reading - Plot

Plot

Faced with a demotion at work due to a drinking problem, Osbourne Cox quits his job as a CIA analyst and resolves to write a memoir about his life and career. When his pediatrician wife Katie finds out, she sees it as a justifiable opportunity to file for divorce and continue her extramarital affair unimpeded. Taking her lawyer's advice, she copies financial records and several other files from her husband's computer onto a CD.

When the CD gets left on the locker room floor of Hardbodies, a local gym, by a careless law firm employee, it falls into the hands of personal trainer Chad Feldheimer and his co-worker Linda Litzke, who mistake the numerical data in the Cox's bank records and the cryptic first draft of Osbourne's memoir to be highly sensitive government information. After getting the data traced back to Osbourne, Chad and Linda plan to give the disc back to him for a reward, with Linda planning to use the money to pay for cosmetic surgery. But when a phone call and subsequent in-person meeting with Osbourne goes horribly wrong, Chad and Linda turn over the disc to the Russian embassy, offering more information in return for monetary compensation. With no other data to give them, Linda persuades Chad to sneak into the Cox home to get more files from their computer.

Meanwhile, Osbourne's increasingly erratic behavior - aggravated in part by his encounters with Chad and Linda - prompt Katie to move ahead with the divorce proceedings. She changes the locks on their house, forcing Osbourne to move onto the sailboat they have docked on the Chesapeake Bay. With her husband out of the picture, Katie invites her lover, Harry Pfarrer to move in. A womanizing Treasury Department employee and U.S. Marshal, Pfarrer is coincidentally also secretly seeing Linda. When he finds a strange man hiding in a bedroom closet in Katie's house - actually Chad in search of more documents for Linda - Harry panics and shoots him point blank in the face. Seeing that Chad has no identification or labels in his suit, Harry believes he has just killed a spy and quickly disposes of the body by dumping it in the bay.

Two days later at the CIA headquarters, an official named Palmer and his director learn that information from Osbourne has been given to the Russian Embassy. They are perplexed and decide to maintain observation until the situation "makes sense". Harry, increasingly anxious after killing a man he believes was a government spy (but who was, in fact, Chad), gets into an argument with Katie and decides to leave the house. On his way out, he spots a man who has been trailing him for the past several days. After tackling him to the ground, Harry finds out that the man is a process server tasked with giving him divorce papers from his wife Sandy, who is having an extramarital liaison of her own. Harry is devastated and goes to see an agitated Linda, who confides in Harry that her friend Chad is missing; he agrees to try to help find him (unaware that Chad is the man he killed in Cox's home).

The next morning, Harry and Linda meet in a park, and she provides him with more information about Chad's disappearance. When Harry realizes that Chad is the man he killed, he flees in terror, assuming Linda is also a spy. Linda then turns to Ted Treffon, the kindhearted manager of Hardbodies, who has unrequited feelings for her. Believing the Russians have kidnapped Chad, he agrees to go to the Cox home to search Osbourne's computer. Unemployed and having spent the past several days living on a small boat, Osbourne becomes unhinged when he finds out that his wife has emptied his bank accounts, and, no longer having keys, decides to break into the house to get some of his personal belongings. Finding Ted in the basement, Osbourne initially takes him to be Katie's lover. He soon realizes Ted's affiliation with Linda and the rest of the "league of morons" he feels he has been struggling against his whole life, and fires a gunshot at him. Ted manages to get out of the house, only to be fatally attacked by a hatchet-wielding Osbourne.

At CIA headquarters a few days later, Palmer and his director try to understand what exactly happened. It is revealed that while trying to board a flight to Venezuela, Harry was detained because his name was on a hot list, Ted's body has been disposed of and the CIA are holding Linda who is promising to keep quiet about everything if they will pay for her cosmetic surgery. A CIA agent shot Osbourne during his hatchet assault on Ted and the bullet has put Osbourne in a coma. The director instructs Palmer to let Harry fly to Venezuela, saying that the U.S. has no extradition treaty with Venezuela, decides the CIA will pay for Linda's surgery and postpones considering Osbourne's situation until he regains consciousness, which is not likely. The director tells Palmer that they did not really learn anything.