Title: Burn After Reading

Faced with a demotion at work due to a drinking problem, Osbourne "Ozzie" Cox angrily quits his job as a CIA analyst and decides to write a memoir. When his pediatrician wife Katie finds out, she sees it as an opportunity to file for divorce and continue her affair with Harry Pfarrer, a married U.S. Marshal.

At the instructions of her lawyer, Katie copies and delivers her husband's financial records and other files, including, unbeknownst to her, the draft of Ozzie's memoir. The lawyer's assistant copies the files onto a CD, which she accidentally leaves on the locker room floor of Hardbodies, a local gym. The disc falls into the hands of dim-witted personal trainer Chad Feldheimer and his co-worker Linda Litzke, who mistakenly believe it to contain sensitive government information.

Chad devises a plan to return the disc, to Ozzie, for a cash reward with Linda seeing this as a quick solution to come up with money to pay for cosmetic surgery she'd been wanting to get. After a phone call and subsequent meeting with Osbourne provoke a furious reaction, Chad and Linda attempt to sell the disc to the Russian embassy. Unbeknownst to them, the Russian "cultural attache" who meets with them is a spy for the CIA.

Osbourne's increasingly temperamental and erratic behavior prompts Katie to change the locks on their house and invite Harry to move in. It is shown that Harry is a womanizer and Katie is not the only "other" woman he's seeing as he routinely goes on dates to have flings with women he meets online. He coincidentally starts seeing Linda Litzke after meeting her from the dating site.

Linda persuades Chad to sneak into the Cox household to get more files from Ozzie's computer. After watching Katie and Harry leave the house, Chad enters the home and starts snooping around until Harry unexpectedly comes home after finishing his post-coital run. Chad rushes upstairs to hide into the bedroom wardrobe closet as Harry enters the bedroom and proceeds to take a quick shower.

After Harry has dressed and while holding his gun, he opens the wardrobe closet to retrieve his holster. Being spooked upon seeing Chad, he instinctively levels his gun and shoots Chad in the head, instantly killing him. Harry then searches his body for any clues to his identity, coming up with an empty wallet and finding the tags from his suit ripped off. He suspects Chad to have been a spy snooping on him.

Two days later at the CIA headquarters, Palmer Smith, Osbourne's former superior, and his director learn that information from Osbourne has been given to the Russian Embassy. They are perplexed: the material delivered to the Russians is of no importance, and the apparent motive of all the involved parties is unknown. Palmer Smith also discloses to the director that the agent they had assigned to spy on Harry had observed Harry dumping Chad's body into the river. The director, unaware of Chad's identity, orders Chad's death to be covered up.

Later that day, Harry and Katie get into an argument that ends with Harry storming out of the house. On his way out, he spots a man who has been trailing him for the past several days. Harry tackles the man and finds out that he is a private detective hired by his wife Sandy to gather evidence of infidelity to divorce him. Separately, it is revealed that Sandy is having an affair of her own. Harry is devastated at the surprise revelation of Sandy's plans to divorce him and goes to see Linda to vent his despair. However, a distressed Linda complains to Harry that she can't always be the one to listen to everyone's problems and confides she has her own issues with "her friend Chad" being missing. Harry agrees to help find Chad; not knowing Chad is the man he shot and killed earlier.

Linda returns to the Russian embassy under the impression that they have abducted Chad. The Russians tell her they do not have Chad and dismiss the CD contents as "drivel" and escort Linda off the embassy grounds. She turns to Ted Treffon, the kindhearted manager of Hardbodies that has unrequited feelings for her, and begs him to help her by sneaking into the Cox household to gather more files from Osbourne's computer.

Harry and Linda meet in a park; Harry believes a man in the park is surveilling him when in actuality, he is a man that Linda had gone on a date with recently. The man is actually staring at Linda as he had recognized her. Linda denies knowing the man, which makes Harry suspicious. When Linda reveals the address where Chad had gone to before disappearing, Harry realizes that Chad is the man he shot. Convinced that Linda is a spy and that everyone in the park is surveilling him, he panics and flees.

Osbourne becomes unhinged when he finds out that Katie has emptied his bank accounts and decides to break into the house to get his alcohol and personal belongings. Finding Ted in the basement, Osbourne shoots Ted and then chases him onto the street where he starts attacking him with a hatchet.

At CIA headquarters a few days later, it is disclosed by Palmer Smith to the director that a surveilling CIA agent intervened by shooting Osbourne, leaving him in a coma and that Ted subsequently died from the attack. Also that Harry has been detained trying to flee to Venezuela, a country that has no extradition treaty with the United States. The director instructs Palmer to send Harry to Venezuela with the implication that he'd rather let Harry "get away" than have to deal with the aftermath if they were to bring him into custody. The director and Palmer agree to leave Osbourne comatose and only worry about dealing with him if he ever wakes. Linda promises to keep quiet if they will pay for her plastic surgery, to which the director agrees.

Palmer and his director try to understand and make sense of all the events that have happened. They conclude that there appears to be no lesson for the agency to learn from the events. "I guess we learned not to do it again," the director says, despite not knowing exactly what they did, and closes the file.
