Having recovered his memory and retired from the CIA, David Webb now teaches Asian studies at a university in Maine and lives with Marie. She is taken captive seemingly by a powerful Chinese drug lord, but in reality, by the United States government using the fictitious drug lord as cover. The scheme is an attempt to turn Webb back into his former self, the mythical Jason Bourne, to go after a Bourne impostor in China. The phony Bourne has been credited with a Far East political assassination that could, in a worst-case scenario, cause a Chinese civil war over the ownership of Hong Kong.