For reasons only partly comprehensible to himself, Bourne develops a compulsion to hunt Carlos. Once in Paris, Bourne learns that his attackers' leader may be 'Carlos,' who is described as the most dangerous terrorist of his time, responsible for numerous killings in many countries and well connected in the highest government circles. They head to Paris to find clues about Bourne's past. When Bourne rescues her at the risk of his own life, St.

Jacques reports his whereabouts to men she thinks are police, but they turn out to be Bourne's pursuers and professional killers who try to rape and kill her. Jacques, as a hostage in order to escape. At the bank and his hotel, men try to kill Bourne, so he quickly takes another hotel guest, Canadian government economist Marie St. Circumstantial evidence leads Bourne to suspect that he should go to Paris, so he wires most of the money there. The man determines that his name is 'Jason Charles Bourne', that he has relations with a firm called Treadstone Seventy-One Corporation, and that his account holds 7.5 million Swiss francs ( equivalent to $5 million in the novel). The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.Īfter being nursed back to health by a local doctor, he goes to Zurich to gain access to the bank, where a clerk recognizes him. They also find he has amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them. One man is cast into the waves before the boat explodes, and is later picked up by fishermen, who find him clinging to debris. The story opens with gunfire on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as ' Carlos the Jackal.' The novel was the basis for the scripts of the 1988 television movie of the same name starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith, and the 2002 film of the same name, starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, and Chris Cooper.

Peter Cannon of Publishers Weekly named The Bourne Identity among the best spy novels of all time, after John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is the first novel of the original Bourne Trilogy, which also includes The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. In the process, he must also determine why several shadowy groups, a professional assassin, and the CIA want him dead.

The Bourne Identity is a 1980 spy fiction thriller by Robert Ludlum that tells the story of Jason Bourne, a man with remarkable survival abilities who has retrograde amnesia, and must seek to discover his true identity.

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