The Bourne Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum is the third novel about Jason Bourne by the American writer Robert Ludlum, published in 1990. It follows The Bourne Supremacy, and it was the last of the Bourne books that Ludlum wrote himself.

David Webb, who has lived for years under the identity of Jason Bourne, is pulled back into the open when a murder at a carnival is arranged as a message for him: his old enemy Carlos the Jackal has resurfaced. Carlos is growing old and his name no longer frightens the people it once did, so he has settled on two things to do before he dies — kill Webb, and destroy the KGB facility at Novgorod, where he was trained and then turned away.

Carlos works through a group of elderly men in Paris known as the Old Men of Paris, criminals who serve him in return for their families being looked after. Webb sends his wife and children to stay with her brother in the Caribbean, and works with his old friend Alexander Conklin, a CIA officer, and with the Agency as far as he is willing to trust it, to find the Jackal first.