Samantha Fox, a willowy, platinum blonde, arrives at a beachside country club in Manila, the Philippines, and sunbathes by the swimming pool. Banking tycoon MacKenzie Portman, sitting at a nearby table, invites her to see his collection of “medieval sporting devices.” When Samantha arrives at Portman's mansion, the tycoon takes her into his “dungeon” and insists that she play a masochistic game, but she instead asphyxiates him with a plastic bag. The next day, Domingo “Dom” de la Torres, the Manila Police Department’s chief of detectives, discusses Portman’s case with Sanchez, his assistant. Dom says the killing was a professional hit by an “invited guest,” not just a woman, but an “absolute knockout.” When Samantha pays her respects at Portman’s funeral, Dom recognizes her from a newspaper photograph. He watches as Samantha leaves the funeral in a limousine with Miss Chow, an agent for a crime syndicate. Later, Miss Chow gives Samantha a package containing the details and photographs of “three plums to be plucked,” and when Samantha returns to her yacht in Manila Bay, she calls her stockbroker to say that $150,000 will be wired into her account. Days later, after studying art books in a library, Samantha assumes the identity of Melinda Burroughs, a bespectacled magazine reporter and photographer, and interviews art collector Justin Stockwell. As Samantha takes photographs of Stockwell’s art pieces, she also snaps pictures of the house and Pinea, Stockwell’s maid. Meanwhile, Dom goes to the country club with the newspaper photograph of Samantha and learns her identity. He tells Sanchez that he wants someone to search Samantha’s yacht, but when an operative slips aboard that night, Samantha defeats him with martial arts and tosses him overboard. The next day, Samantha visits Lu Chang, an old friend of her father, who gives her a vial containing a paralyzing agent. When Pinea, Stockwell’s maid, calls in sick, Samantha takes her place, wearing a maid’s uniform and dark makeup. As she attends to Stockwell and puts salts into his Jacuzzi bath, he is verbally abusive toward her. After she pours Lu Chang’s potion into the water, Stockwell becomes paralyzed. Samantha reveals her identity, stuffs a towel in the drain, and watches him drown. Later, at the crime scene, Dom and Sanchez agree that Stockwell’s killer was probably the same person who killed Portman. Sanchez learns from the butler that "Melinda Burroughs" interviewed Stockwell earlier, but the woman did not fit the description of the real reporter. Dom visits Samantha at a party, identifies himself, and takes her outside. A sketch artist approaches and asks if he can draw Samantha’s portrait for charity. While the man sketches, Dom suggests small changes, including eyeglasses, until the final drawing depicts Samantha’s disguise as Melinda Burroughs. Dropping pretenses, Samantha tells Dom she left the second man he sent to search her yacht last night in a dinghy, twenty miles offshore. The next day, Dom takes Samantha on a hunting date outside the city. They return to Manila for dinner, and when several street thugs demand money, both Dom and Samantha dispatch them using martial arts. The couple then returns to Dom’a apartment to make love. After Samantha leaves in the morning, Sanchez meets Dom for breakfast with news that Stockwell’s killer stuffed the Jacuzzi drain with a towel stained by brown dye, matching the complexion of the missing maid. Stockwell’s butler also recognized the lady in Dom’s sketch as Miss Burroughs. Meanwhile, Samantha attends the esort of Madame Ruanda, a famous French cosmetologist and beautician, and catches the older woman’s eye. That night, Samantha finds three men beating and raping a woman, preparing her for Madame Ruanda’s white slavery ring. Afterward, a man comes to Samantha's cabin with an invitation from Madame Ruanda, to visit her mansion. The two women drink Cognac, and Samantha massages Madame Ruanda, then knocks her out with chloroform. Putting one of Madame Ruanda’s instructional facial videotapes in a videocassette recorder, Samantha straps the cosmetologist into a chair, slathers her face with lotion and mud, then hooks electrodes to her face and electrocutes her. The next day, Dom meets with the district attorney, Jim, to discuss a new Asian-American crime syndicate moving into Manila. Dom reasons that Stockwell and Ruanda, one a major smuggler and the other the head of a white slavery ring, were killed because they turned down an offer to join the syndicate. Guessing that Carlos Rossimo and Octavio Calderon, the city’s two major drug dealers, also rejected the syndicate’s offer, Dom predicts they are next on Samantha’s hit list. Dom visits both Rossimo and Calderon to warn them. Later, Samantha has Dom take her to the cockfights, but she becomes aroused by the blood and hurries him back to his apartment for frantic lovemaking. The following night, as they lie in bed, Dom explains to Samantha how he thinks she killed Portman and Stockwell, but says he is not sure about Madame Ruanda. When he admits to warning Rossimo and Calderon, Samantha says her own father and mother were murdered by mobsters a dozen years earlier, but the police never brought the killers to justice. Dom suggests that she retire now, so that he does not have to arrest her. The next day, Samantha calls both Rossimo and Calderon and tells each man that if he wants to find out who is trying to kill him, he should be at the Rizal Memorial Baseball Stadium at 6:30 p.m. The only difference in her two messages is that one man must be on the third base side and the other on the first base side. Driving to the stadium, she notices Sanchez behind her, leads him onto a mountain road, and tricks him into driving off a cliff to his death. When both gangsters arrive separately at the stadium with their bodyguards, the men face off against each other in the dark. Samantha fires a shot from the stands to start a gunfight, then leaves as the gangsters wipe each other out with machineguns. The next day, Samantha plants a bomb below deck on her yacht and waits for Dom to arrive. Offering him wine, she explains how she set up Rossimo and Calderon to kill each other, and as they drink from their glasses, Dom passes out and Samantha spits her wine back into her glass. She goes ashore and drives to Manila International Airport. When Dom awakens, a note from Samantha tells him that she loves him, and that if he carefully unties the Chinese knots that bind him, he can escape from the yacht before a bomb goes off. He slips his bonds and runs from the cabin. As Samantha’s commercial airliner takes off over the bay, she looks out the window and sees the yacht explode below.