Black Dragons

Just after Pearl Harbor is bombed in December 1941, the United States prepares for war. At the Washington, D.C. home of Dr. Bill Saunders, a group of bankers and industrialists, who are also fifth columnists, gather to discuss their anti-American activities. During the evening, an unexpected visitor, Dr. Colomb, arrives and Saunders sees him alone. Colomb injects Saunders with a hypodermic and the physician becomes zombie-like. The gathering disperses and when one of the members, Kearney, hails a cab, he discovers Colomb in the back seat. Both Colomb and Kearney mysteriously disappear, but the next day, Kearney's dead body is found on the steps of the Japanese embassy with a Japanese dagger in his hand. FBI agent Don Martin is assigned to investigate the case, and when he goes to Saunders' home, he encounters Saunders' niece Alice, who has just returned from a trip. Saunders claims to be ill and refuses to see anyone. Alice is surprised to learn that Colomb, a stranger to her, is staying at the house, claiming to be an old friend of her uncle. When two of Saunders' confederates, Van Dyke and Ryder, go to consult with Saunders over the death of Kearney, they find cohort Wallace, a Detroit industrialist, dead in his hotel room with a Japanese dagger in his hand. Although Saunders remains in his room, Colomb manipulates him into speaking through the door to Van Dyke and Ryder. Colomb then tricks them into shooting each other in the basement of Saunders' house. Alice hears the gunshots and stumbles upon one of the bodies, but when she returns to the cellar with Don, the body has disappeared. Later, like Kearney, Van Dyke and Ryder are found dead on the Japanese embassy steps. Don convinces the last member of the group, New York banker Hanlin, to return to Washington, D.C. and act as a decoy. At the Saunders home, Don's chief reveals that "Alice" is actually his best female agent. The chief explains that the real Alice Saunders consulted with him when she saw a picture in the paper of a man purported to be her uncle; however, her uncle disappeared from a ship in the Orient twenty years earlier. Everyone rushes to a hooded figure that stumbles downstairs, and Colomb, hiding in another room, seizes this chance to strangle Hanlin. As he dies, Hanlin shoots Colomb, who is arrested. The hooded figure identifies himself as Saunders, and tells his story: Years earlier, the Nazis loaned plastic surgeon Dr. Melcher, who has been posing as Colomb, to the Japanese to transform their best agents, members of the order known as Black Dragons, into American figures of power. Melcher completed the job using the photos and the death masks of various Americans. To conceal the evidence, the Japanese planned to kill Melcher. When he was temporarily locked in a cell with the real Colomb, who was going to be released, Melcher managed to alter his cellmate's features to look like him and escaped, ultimately seeking revenge against the Black Dragons. Saunders, a Japanese who was surgically altered, reveals that Melcher's recent injections have turned him into a veritable monster. Melcher dies and the spy ring dies with him.