User:Craverguy/Company Business

Company Business is a 1991 spy film, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Plot
Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman) is a former operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, who now makes his living by practicing industrial espionage. One night, shortly after completing a mission to retrieve the stolen chemical formulae of a cosmetics firm, he receives a coded telephone call informing him that he has been reactivated by the CIA, and summoning him to their headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Once there, he has a meeting with Elliot Jaffe (Kurtwood Smith), the Director of Central Intelligence, who informs him that the KGB, hard-up for cash since the effective end of the Cold War, has agreed to sell the Company back Benjamin Sobel (Bob Sherman), a U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union during the 1960s and imprisoned for espionage. The money will be provided by members of a Colombian drug cartel looking to curry favor with the American government, and the Company wants Boyd to deliver it and pick up Sobel. To make the entirely illegal operation seem legitimate, he is to bring with him Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a former KGB mole who was caught trying to infiltrate the State Department in 1984, and make the whole thing look like a prisoner exchange. The meeting will take place in Berlin, which has recently been reunified.

Grushenko, however, is somewhat leery of being returned home, believing that he will be suspected of treason and executed as soon as he arrives. Although he tries to escape at the airport while Boyd buys magazines in the gift shop, he is caught, and the two board their plane without further incident. Once in Berlin, the two meet up with Mike Flinn (Daniel von Bargen), a CIA agent who served with Boyd in Nicaragua (implicitly, during the Iran–Contra affair), and who will oversee the exchange, which is scheduled to take place in a metro tunnel under the former East Berlin. At the exchange, things seem to be going well, with Boyd and the KGB each sending their prisoner (Grushenko carrying the money in a briefcase) across the tunnel simultaneously, when Boyd recognizes "Sobel" as a man he saw boarding an Aeroflot flight to Moscow at Dulles two days before, and also as a Texas A&M University economics professor whose alleged kidnapping he had read about in the paper. Believing that the exchange is a trap, he orders Grushenko back to their metro car. After a short gunfight in which two KGB agents are shot, the two manage to escape with the money.

Holing up in a cabaret staffed entirely by drag queens, they phone Jaffe to inform him of what went wrong. Jaffe supplies them with the address of a Company safe house where they can hide out until he sends someone to debrief them. After he hangs up, however, he is ordered by his superior, Colonel Grissom (Terry O'Quinn), to kill them in order to prevent any possibility of scandal over the botched operation. Grissom also orders that another exchange for Sobel be negotiated.

Once at the safe house, Boyd is all set to ring the doorbell and go inside, but Grushenko insists on being cautious. The two huddle across the street behind a parked car while Grushenko shoots at the doorbell with a suppressed pistol. When his third shot connects squarely with the bell, a bomb inside the building detonates and destroys it. Realizing that his own employers are now trying to kill him, Boyd agrees to stick together with Grushenko to escape from Berlin with the money. Their first move is to locate Horst Van Hoven (Joachim Bliese), a forger, ex-Nazi, and professional double agent currently allied with the West. Horst supplies them with false passports and credit cards, but soon takes a surreptitious phone call from his CIA handler, whom he alerts of the fugitives' whereabouts. When Boyd and Grushenko discover this, they tie him up and gag him in one of the chemical baths in his own darkroom, but are unable to leave the building before a team of agents led by Flinn arrive. Flinn and company search the apartment thoroughly, but are unable to locate their quarry. After they leave, it is revealed that the two have been hiding in Horst's fold away bed, which had not been searched.