It had started as a garden variety bar room brawl. Somebody said something, somebody did something, and fists began to fly. It quickly escalated to bottles, chairs and even knives. The strange thing was, everybody ended up fighting everybody; there weren't really any "sides" left. And nobody at the bar called 911.

It was after the cops showed up, alerted by a passing motorist, that things got really bad. Within seconds after entering Toomey's Tavern, their guns were blazing. But as both the forensic evidence and testimony from the few survivors later established, the cops were shooting at each other as well as the brawlers, without rhyme or reason.

More police arrived, and cordoned off the building. By this time, a deathly quiet had settled over the tavern. A deputy chief got on the bullhorn, demanding that anyone inside come out immediately with his hands on his head. One of the patrons complied, and told the deputy chief that he was the only one who could, because the rest were either dead or wounded.

It was time for the ambulances and the meat wagons to do their job.

Then it was time for the CSI.

The Las Vegas Crime Scene Investigation unit was justly known as one of the best in the country. It quickly established that some of the drinks at the bar had been spiked with date rape drug. One of the survivors, a freshman biology student at UNLV, had been found with a packet in his jeans. It was obvious what he'd been after, although with his acne, bad breath and B.O. it was unlikely he'd have scored even with rohypnol.

Autopsies and blood tests showed various drugs in some the victims, but nothing to account for the violence. Certainly the cops had been clean. It was remarkable that the delusions experienced by the victims seemed too specific. One survivor insisted that one of the others had called him a nigger; another that the black patron had cursed him as a faggot.

Both denied making any slurs, and both complained that somebody had stunk up the place with a farting Snooze the Wonder Dog just before it all went down. The toy couldn't be found; one of the EMS workers had tossed it in the garbage, which was collected before the CSI showed up. Nobody thought it worth the trouble to schlep out to the Clark County landfill to look for Snooze. Not that it would have mattered by then.

The biology student, Terry Venters, was pretty much a loner. He hadn't taken part in any extra-curricular activities, had never gone to parties, never had a girlfriend. He'd had a study partner, Art Tatum; but Tatum, by strange coincidence, had been killed the day of the massacre when his car had crashed and burned off Route 93.

The CSI threw up its collective hands and called in the Centers for Disease Control, which did their usual thing, sealed off the bar, sent in men in hazmat suits and ran every conceivable test. Intended to reassure the public, the CDC action had precisely the opposite effect. Headlines in the Sun had suggested the massacre must have been some sort of gang thing, although organized crime in Vegas wasn't known for violence. Now people were talking bioterrorism.

The CDC didn't get any further than the CSI, and called in the FBI. Somebody there tagged it as a blue rose case. That meant they couldn't make any sense of it either, but as the FBI was now obligated to share information with other agencies, the Toomey's Tavern case made its way to those other agencies--including the National Intelligence Agency.

None of the other agencies knew it, but the case had already made its way to the NIA through another channel. But the NIA had to wait on official reports from those agencies before taking official action, because that other channel was Lexa Starr and Lexa couldn't afford to be openly involved in such an investigation. She was risking too much already. Like that operation she'd been dragooned into a few days before the incident in Vegas.

If Alexandra Starr had been an ordinary human, or even what the world thought she was, she'd have welcomed that operation and the resulting publicity. It didn't make sense to wear a fancy uniform and go around saving lives and fighting crime if people didn't appreciate what you were doing.

But Lexa wasn't an ordinary human, and she wasn't here just to save lives and fight crime. She'd rather have remained an urban legend, if that were possible--which it wasn't. Her real business on Earth wasn't good deeds. If the world should find out about her real business, there would be mass panic, global chaos.

Yet the Project required not just the kind of secrecy the government alone could ensure, but the kind of funding that the government alone could procure. There were tradeoffs. There had to be. Like this oil field fire in Qumar. It would bring her appreciation, sure. But not the kind she wanted.

Some Al Qaeda types had set off a series of incendiary bombs, evidently in hopes of destabilizing an already shaky regime, not to mention creating yet another crisis for the U.S. administration--the same administration she and the NIA relied on for continued support of the Project. The administration knew it. Action was called for. Favors were called in.

There were people who were paid to handle this kind of thing. People at companies like Kellogg Brown & Root. They'd done their job in Kuwait, and done it again 12 years later in Baraq, after the invasion and regime change. But this time, the administration wanted it done yesterday. They had leaned on the NIA, and the NIA had leaned on Lexa.

"You can make quick work of it," they'd told her.

That was true.

"Think of the good will it will bring," they'd added.

That wasn't.

The Embassy handlers had wanted her to wear something more modest than the skin-tight white uniform that failed to offer even the minimal coverage of a skirt. She'd had to explain that only her uniform could survive the fire: did they want her to do the job naked?

Well, of course not, they'd quickly conceded. These people were so stupid! No wonder the country seemed to stumble from one diplomatic disaster to another. As for her mission, it wasn't a disaster. But it wasn't exactly a triumph, either.

She'd flown out to the oil field dressed the only way she could be, but as soon as she landed, another embassy handler had given her an abaya and instructed her to put it on immediately. She'd glared at him.

"Nothing was said about this," she said.

"The Crown Prince wants this," the handler insisted. "The foreign minister wants it. And the President wants it."

"I don't think you understand the situation," Lexa said.

"We're paid to understand the situation," the handler said. "You're here at our request, and at our behest. We have been informed that there is a quid-pro-quo here, although we are not aware of the details."

The arrogance of the man!

Well, at least he'd kept the press at a safe distance. Nobody had any cameras. That was an inflexible rule: no close-ups, no pictures from which she might be identified.

So she made a show of compliance. The Qumari oilfield workers a few dozen yards away looked disappointed, as she covered herself in the Muslim garment, although they'd never have admitted it.

Lexa was also advised by the handler to leave the scene discreetly once her mission was accomplished. It had apparently sunk in, finally, that she would emerge from the flames as a brazenly-dressed infidel. The workers were evidently anticipating just that; they were taking up positions facing the fire--some had binoculars out. Word had gotten out, somehow, that she was coming.

The closest fire was three hundred yards away. Lexa set out at a walking pace; had she run or flown, the abaya might have come loose. It was 100 degrees in the shade, even where she started, and there wasn't any shade. The heat didn't bother Lexa, but she felt sorry for the poor Qumari women who had to go around bundled up like this all the time.

There was little to see but a towering column of flame and black smoke; most of the wreckage consisted of the pump and its connections--this was a long-established well, not a freshly-drilled one with the kind of tower people associate with oil wells. At the base of the column was the exploded wellhead that fueled the blaze. She used her X-ray vision to scan the details as she headed straight for it.

Lexa's abaya burst into flames before she reached the inferno. Maybe her handler hadn't thought of that. Tough. He certainly hadn't advised her what to do about it. So she felt free to show him what she thought of the whole business by turning towards him and the workers for a few moments, hands on hips.

Even from this distance, she could tell that he had his own binoculars glued to his eyes as the rough black fabric of the abaya burned away to reveal her invulnerable body in all its glory, from her golden tresses to her magnificent breasts and legs that wouldn't quit. Her blue cape, freed from the abaya, was caught in the blast of heat from the wellhead and billowed around her, contrasting with the pure white of the rest of her uniform.

Show over. Time for work. She turned around, jogged the rest of the way and plunged into the hellfire. Braving the fire itself wasn't the hard part; the hard part was that the intense heat had weakened the steel structure, even beyond the damage caused by the bomb itself. It wasn't enough to simply squeeze the shattered pipe shut; she had to mold a cap strong enough to withstand the pressure of the superheated oil--that would hold up until the temperature came down.

Professional firefighters relied on technology. They had to bring huge bulldozers to the scene, with extension booms strong enough to lift caps weighing tons. They needed heavy duty hoses and pumps to play torrents of water on the fire: not to put it out, but to cool the surroundings barely enough to move the dozer in close, to keep the firefighters alive in their protective gear as they jockeyed the cap into position, then lowered it onto the wellhead to snuff out the blaze.

Lexa's only tools were her hands. Like a potter working soft clay, she molded the pliant metal, forcing it into the shape she could see in her mind's eye, while keeping it thick enough to hold against the pressure of thick black oil that still surged from the depths of the Earth to feed the fire. It was the hardest work she had ever done; more than once, the angry oil burst again from a weak spot just when she thought she had it under control. But at last the cap held; the fire burned itself out.

Nine wells to go. But the work went easier; Lexa had experience now, and her skills improved as she moved from one to the next. Within hours, she had all the wells capped and all the fires were out. It would have taken the Kellogg Brown & Root people weeks. But she couldn't savor her triumph, couldn't greet the workers whose job it would be to make the permanent repairs and get the field back into production. She had her marching orders.

Lexa soared straight into the sky, too fast to give the distant workers and embassy people another thrill. The friction of the air was enough to cleanse her uniform of the soot and oil that remained from her labors. Not that it mattered. When she appeared that night at an embassy reception in Tissandir, she was as modestly attired as it was possible to be without violating Western fashion sense--a taboo nearly as strong as the Muslim dress code.