Salt

Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is tortured by North Korean troops in 2003 on suspicion of spying. Ted Winter, her supervisor, quickly trades her for a North Korean prisoner and escorts her to safety (Liev Schreiber). While walking towards the border, she inquires as to why she was released, and it is explained that her boyfriend Mike (seen staring at her from the other side of the border) petitioned everyone in the government for her release. As a result, they agreed to make an exchange in order to prevent him from causing unnecessary publicity.

Salt is now watching her now-husband Mike work at the breakfast table with spiders (he is an arachnologist, meaning he studies spiders for a living). He wishes her a happy anniversary after noticing her standing there. She offers to make him breakfast, but he declines, insulting her efforts. The scene then shifts to her at work, where she is studying how to fold a napkin into a certain design in order for the anniversary meal she has arranged to be flawless. Winter interrupts, they talk for a bit, and then get ready to go as the workweek comes to a conclusion.

As they leave, another agent pursues them and eventually informs them that a defector has arrived and intends to provide them with information. Salt and Winter return upstairs to see if the Russian has any relevant information. Salt enters the room and begins the interrogation after setting up neural scans to assess if the defector is lying.

The defector introduces himself as Orlov and tells her about a Russian espionage program set up during the Cold War in which children from American families were kidnapped and replaced with Russian children trained to be sleeper cell spies by a Russian official in the hopes of restoring Russia's dominance one day. These agents, known as K-12s, are said to be a hoax. They would take the identity of the kid until Day X, an unspecified date of action on which they would strike. Day X appears to be approaching, with events beginning with the assassination of the Russian President at the burial of the United States Vice President the next day in Manhattan and concluding with the assassination of the Russian President.