The movie opens in the year 2003 with Evelyn Salt (Angelia
Jolie) being tortured in a prison in North Korea being accused of espionage.
She is soon traded for a North Korean prisoner and escorted to safety by her
boss Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber). While walking towards the border, she asks
why she was set free, and it is explained that her boyfriend Mike (seen staring
at her from the other side of the border) was petitioning everyone in the
government for her to be set free. Thus, in order for them to stop him from
stirring up more unneeded publicity, they agreed to make an exchange.
In present day, Salt is watching her now husband Mike working at the breakfast
table with his bugs (he is an arachnologist, meaning he studies spiders for a
living). After he notices her standing there, he says happy anniversary. She
offers to cook him breakfast, but he passes, mocking her cooking. The scene
then cuts to her at work, learning online how to fold a napkin into a certain
pattern so that the anniversary dinner she has planned is perfect. Winter
interrupts, they chat for a while, and then get ready to head out as its close
to the end of the workday. As they are leaving, another agent chases them and
finally tells them that a defector has come in and wishes to give them
information. Wanting to see if the Russian has any useful information, Salt and
Winter head back upstairs. Neural scans are set up in order to determine if the
defector is lying, and Salt enters the room and begins the interview.
The defector begins by saying that his name is Orlov and proceeds by telling
her a story about a Russian espionage program set up during the Cold War in which
children of American families were kidnapped then replaced with Russian
children that had been trained to be sleeper cell spies by a Russian official
in hopes of restoring Russia's dominance one day. These agents are called
K-12s, and are supposedly a myth. They would assume the child's identity until
Day X, the undisclosed date of action in which they would strike. Day X is
apparently coming, and its events will apparently begin with the murder of the
Russian President at the U.S. Vice President's funeral the next day in
Manhattan and will finish with the U.S. President's assassination a day later.
Winter tells her to wrap up the interview, as they do not believe him. As she
is leaving, he explains that the agent that will murder the President is Evelyn
Salt. Salt leaves the room and is visibly upset. As she walks into the viewing
room where her colleagues are, it is determined by the neural scan that he was
being truthful throughout the interview. She begins speaking to the Counter
Intelligence officer named Peabody and Winter, claiming her innocence. Winter
is believing her and begins speaking to Peabody about how to proceed. Orlov is
escorted out by two agents and goes into an elevator with them. Salt is given
her phone in order to contact Mike as, when the cover of an agent is blown,
often their whole fake life is in danger. She is told to wait in the
interrogation room while they attempt to figure out how to proceed. As she
watches Winter and Peabody argue, she realizes that she is in danger.
Cut to Orlov in the elevator. A blade comes out of his shoe, and he proceeds to
kill both guards with him and escape. Winters and Peabody are alerted to
Orlov's escape, giving Salt the opportunity to escape the room and attempt to
get out of the building. As the security of the building begins to tighten, she
finds herself cornered in the interrogation room again where she rigs up an
explosive device to fire at the SWAT team. She fires it, knocking them
unconscious and is able to steal a gun in the process. She then uses the gun to
break a window and proceeds to climb onto the roof then onto the street. She
gets into a taxi, attempts to call Mike again and hangs up after again getting
their apartment's voicemail. She breaks her SIM card and then gets out of the taxi
cab at her apartment building. As she walks in, she notices Mike's chair has
been knocked over and how his sandwich is half eaten. There has obviously been
a struggle, and he has been kidnapped.
As Salt packs her bag and takes some of Mike's spiders, Winters and Peabody are
assembling a SWAT team to go to her house to see if she is there. They arrive
just as she is climbing out of her window. She narrowly escapes and climbs into
a neighbor's apartment. As she speaks to the child in the apartment and changes
her clothes, she flashes back again to her husband and parts of their lives
together. She escapes and while walking away from the building, is spotted by
Winter. A chase ensues, and Salt is cornered when she then jumps onto a semi
truck passing under the overpass that she is on. The agents follow her and
shoot as she jumps from one truck to another then finally lands on the ground.
She then steals a motorcycle and manages to outmanoeuvre them and escape.
At this point, Salt heads to a bar. While in the bathroom, she steals the coat
and ID of a fellow patron, takes a bus to New York City, and uses it (the ID,
not the bus) to rent a small hotel room. There, she dyes her hair and steals
clothes. She then begins to plan out how to get into the cathedral and prints a
subway map.
At this point, another flashback shows us that Evelyn Salt is indeed a Russian
implant spy. The next day, she boards a subway train and plants a smoke device.
While everyone is distracted, she gets off the train and into the tunnels
beneath the cathedral. As she gets into position, the funeral begins taking
place in the church. As the Russian President gets up to deliver a speech, Salt
throws an explosive device onto the roof (which is directly under where the
president is standing) and the floor crumbles below him, causing him to fall on
to her level. Panic ensues and she presumably shoots the Russian president.
Peabody comes in, and she surrenders despite having the opportunity to shoot
him. As she is taken away, Winter screams that he hopes she rots in jail for
what she has done. She is put into an SUV and is transported in a caravan
through the city. She then manages to eject both of her guards from the car and
stun the driver, causing him to wreck the police cars ahead of and behind them.
To escape, the other police now swarming around her, she drives the SUV over
the guardrail and into the street below, wrecking the car. As the public come
to see if everyone inside is all right, Salt escapes.
The news is, at this point, covering the death of the Russian President and the
riots that are now happening across Moscow. Salt is then seen on a ferry boat,
and heads to a scrap metal yard. There, she meets with Orlov and embraces him.
It is revealed that he is the man who took her in and trained her to become a
Russian spy. She is then taken to a ship in the Hudson that serves as the
Russian spies' home base. There, she is told that the next step of their plan
is to seize nuclear weapons and begin a large-scale war between Russia and the USA
to destroy the world. After being taken into the hull of the ship, she sees
Mike being held hostage. To see whether or not she is loyal, Orlov drowns him
and watches her reaction. When she fails to react, he introduces her to her
fellow brother spies and then escorts her into his office to divulge more
details about the plan. Once hearing that she is to meet with a spy disguised
as a NATO officer the next morning and travel with him to Washington, DC, Salt
pours them both a drink, and then goes to the rendezvous point to meet with her
contact NATO officer.
After he arrives and boards the plane, she recognizes him as one of her fellow
classmates and flashes back to more of her spy training as a child in the
former USSR. They talk about their lives and their childhood. It is revealed
that Salt was the best in her class and how she will finish first in this plan
as well. He reveals that the plan will be to kill the US President while he is
in his security bunker at the White House. Upon their arrival in Washington, he
gives her a new ID and is disguised as a fellow NATO officer. After getting
into the White House, he reveals that he is going to sacrifice himself by
threatening the President by blowing himself up as a suicide bomber so that he
will flee to the bunker where Salt is to kill him. Winter is among the group of
men around the President and fleeing with him to the bunker. As they all get
into the elevator to head down to the bunker, Salt is above them, jumping from
floor to floor in the elevator shaft framework. Once on the bunker's level, she
proceeds to kill the guards outside and pass safely into the bunker.
In the bunker, the President is raising the terror alert in the country to
Def-CON 2 as Russia is apparently preparing to fire nuclear weapons at the US
in retaliation for what they see as an act of war (the killing of their
President by a CIA agent). After the level is raised, Winter stands up and
suddenly begins killing all those in the room. Finally, it is just him and the
President. (In this out-of-the-blue twist, Ted Winter is another Russian spy
just like Evelyn Salt.)
After telling the President to activate strategic nuclear deployment strategies
and being denied, he hits the President and knocks him unconscious. Salt has
witnessed all of this. She approaches the bulletproof window and beckons Winter
to use the President's hand to reauthorize and activate the strategic strike on
Mecca and Tehran. She begins speaking to him through the glass, appealing to
him by asking why he never told her that he too was a spy. She begs him to let
her join him and finally he relents. As Winter is turning to go to the door to
let her in, the news flashes on the television, saying that the Russian
President is not dead as previously thought and had merely been given a
paralytic. Realizing that Salt used venom from Mike's spiders so that it
appeared that she had killed him, Winter says that he didn't trust her after
she came back from North Korea. He knew from the start that she had fallen for
Mike and was not the same person that she had been. That was why Ted Winter
told Orlov to kidnap and kill Mike, as well as why she was being made into the
patsy and why Winter would be seen as the hero. Salt is enraged at this point
and attempts to fire her gun through the glass. When this fails, she sees the
access box next to the door on the other side of the room. She goes to it on
the other side, firing her gun at it until the wall behind it is exposed. She
then rewires the box so that she can get into the bunker conference room.
In the room, Salt and Winters fight. The activation of the weapons is almost
complete, but at the last minute, the secret service arrives and overpowers
them. Instead of giving herself up, Salt jumps to pull the plug on the
computer, cancelling the weapon strike activation and is shot in the process.
Both she and Winter are escorted out, and as she is wearing a vest, Salt is
unharmed. As she is being led up from the bunker as a prisoner, she sees Winter
getting his wounds treated next to the stairs. She jumps toward him, wrapping
her handcuffs around his neck and jumping over the balcony to strangle him. By
the time she is pulled up, he is dead after neck has been broken and she is
handed over to Peabody.
They board a helicopter, and he asks her why she killed Winter. Her reply is
"someone had to". She then explains her side of the story, and
Peabody begins to believe her but points out that no one else will. She says
that there are more Russian sleeper spies out there that will stop at nothing to
interfere. She convinces him to let her go as they have taken everything from
her and she will stop at nothing until all of the spies of K-12 are dead. He
then undoes her cuffs and she jumps from the chopper, escaping into the Potomac
River.
