Sensing an opportunity to take control of CI by showing Hart's incompetence, National Security Agency operatives plan to accomplish what CI never could-hunt down and kill Bourne.

The organization, the Black Legion, and its lethal plot have also popped up on the radar of Central Intelligence, where new director Veronica Hart is struggling to assert her authority. The young man died carrying information about the group's terrorist activities, including an immediate plan to attack the United States. Aware of his frustrations, his academic mentor, Professor Specter, asks for help investigating the murder of a former student by a previously unknown Muslim extremist sect.

But after so many adrenaline-soaked years of risking his life, Bourne finds himself chafing under the quiet life of a linguistics professor. Jason Bourne returns to Georgetown University and the mild world of his alter ego, David Webb, hoping for normalcy. Someone who wants to know, 'Who is the more deadly agent?' Someone else has been watching and manipulating them. As Bourne's destiny circles closer to Arkadin's, it becomes clear that the eventual collision of these men is not of their own making. Yet before it was dismantled, it produced Bourne and Arkadin, giving them equal skills, equal force, and equal cunning. A covert course designed to create ruthless assassins for C.I., it was shuttered by Congress for corruption.

The trail will lead him through layers of conspiracy to a vicious Russian mercenary, Leonid Arkadin, who was also a graduate of the Central Intelligence training program Treadstone. But Bourne never knows what terrible acts he'll discover he committed when he digs into the past. Now he's determined to find the ring's owner and purpose. Her killing dredges up snatches of Bourne's impaired memory, in particular the murder of a young woman on Bali who entrusted him with a strangely engraved ring-an artifact of such powerful significance that people have killed to obtain it. Facing down mercenaries in Africa, Jason Bourne witnesses the death of an art dealer named Tracy Atherton.

Every Road To You by Phyllis Bourne