Ruth Epstein's prescient script, penned several years ago, imagines the United States at war in the Middle East, a conflict that has so sharply curtailed oil supply that gasoline goes for $6 a gallon. Coming to the apparent rescue is a multibillion-dollar acquisition of a Russian oil company by an American conglomerate headed by Robert Loggia's tough CEO Jared Tolson.

When a Wall Street banker putting the deal together is murdered -- just after expressing strong reservations about the deal -- Tolson turns to Slater's Tom Hanson, who not only was a close friend of the dead man but works for a firm with a squeaky-clean image on the Street. Tom brings his firm's most recent hire, Abbey Gallagher (Blair), into the deal to get her feet wet in high finance. Soon Tom and Abby, an environmental activist despite her Harvard Business School graduate degree, find themselves attracted to each other even as conspiracies and another murder expose them to increasing danger. Powerful interests want this deal to go through no matter what.