Securities attorney Susanna Sloane is engaged as a consultant by the Chinese government. While in Hong Kong she is drugged, and unknowingly raped and photographed nude by Henry Wu, a Chinese official. She begins to have bizarre and unnerving psychic episodes. Assisted by a hypnotherapist she discovers how Wu had used her. The secretary of the treasury, Roger Howell, enlists her aid in preventing the Chinese government's manipulation and purchase of oil futures. She travels with Howell to Beijing. They begin an affair. The Chinese hire Susanna to negotiate oil field development in Venezuela. Susanna devises a scheme to benefit both China and the U.S. She returns to Hong Kong to destroy Wu's photos, and, with the aid of the Russian mob, breaks into Wu's apartment. Events spiral out of control and Wu and his housekeeper are killed. The Chinese send investigators to New York to question her, but a high-ranking Chinese general, secretly delighted at the removal of a political rival, stops them.