At times chemist Pamela Princeton disguises herself as Granny Glue, a street person pulling a cart of all she owns - but actually an array of specialty purpose adhesives - to rescue someone in need of help or to inhibit and thwart those up to no good without revealing her true identity. When a coworker goes missing under strange circumstance, possibly kidnapped, Princeton investigates. She suspects that egomaniac Karol Karlinsky, who calls himself the Perfect Master and rules over the highly secretive Perfect Way cult, is the kidnapper. With the aid of her special chemical tools she sneaks into the cult's well-protected walled compound and uses the group's own routine procedures that are intended to give the members a degree of anonymity among themselves to explore the place undetected for a while. At the same time she gives the police their first views of the interior of the compound by way of her laptop's videocam. She finds her missing coworker who has been surgically altered to make him effectively an automaton but the brain surgery performed by Karlinsky was not completely successful. As she feeds information to the police about others being held in the compound against their will she must stay ahead of the group's security men searching for the person who isn't acting the way the ciphers should. Karlinsky's planned Perfect Way threatens to fall apart around him, pushing him close to the edge. When Karlinsky declares war on the city for opposing him the big question becomes whether Princeton and the captive high-tech workers inside will survive until the police can save them.