"Thank you," the cardinal said when he caught his breath.

"It is nothing, Eminence," the newcomer said in the prelate's native Portuguese.

He knelt, took the still-shaking white hand proffered and kissed the ring of office. Braden was a big man, with dark hair, a neat black beard and mustache and piercing black eyes. He rose smoothly to his feet.

Cardinal Adalberto de Souza sat up. He gratefully accepted the towel and bottle of water the wealthy industrialist handed him. He mopped his high, sweat-sheened brow and drank.

Then he looked around. They were alone in the small but brightly lit, clean and wonderfully appointed weight room, one of many dotted throughout the sprawling Vatican City complex. The modern church had begun to pressure its shepherds to tend to the condition of their bodies, rather than regarding such as vanity and indeed the sin of pride, as in years past. Cardinal de Souza was still one of relatively few among princes of the church to avail himself of the weight rooms, although many of the younger priests were quite passionate about fitness.

He shook his head. He had seen many changes come to the church. Not all were for the better.

He looked up at his guest. "Good morning, Mr. Braden. It is an unexpected pleasure to see you."

"The pleasure is mine, Eminence," the shaven-headed man said in his exquisitely modulated baritone.

He reached a manicured hand inside the coat of his dark suit and brought forth a manila envelope. This he handed to the prelate.

"The negatives," he said.

Vanitas Vanitatum, omnia vanitas, Garin Braden thought. He had seen it all before.

Braden and Sons was one of Europe's most established and respected industrial concerns. The company was second only to arms maker Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta in age. It had long outlasted such one-time peers as the Fugger and Medici banking empires. One thing had mystified the cognoscenti for centuries. It seemed each Braden son looked unnervingly like the last, and all the others before him.

Garin Braden knew a secret. He knew many. He had grown rich trafficking in secrets long before it became a cliché that knowledge itself constituted wealth.

One of the deepest secrets he knew was that there wereno Braden sons. He and his one peer – his deadly rival, former mentor and sometime best friend Roux – had no heirs. Garin Braden remained eternal in many guises.

"With my compliments, Your Eminence," he said.

The cardinal snatched the envelope as greedily as a small boy with a Christmas present. "They're all here?" he asked.

Braden smiled. "Have I given Your Eminence cause to doubt my diligence?"

"No, no. Forgive me, my son. I know you to be most scrupulous."

It might have been hard not to laugh at that, had Garin not had so many years of practice.

Garin had betrayed Jeanne Darc – whom moderns had until recently miscalled d'Arc – to the English. He had been motivated by simple jealousy, born of insecurity. He'd felt his master was devoting too much time and attention to his female protégée, and too little to him. It was intolerable that a brilliant, apt pupil and apprentice should be pushed aside for a teenage schizophrenic with a sanguinary cast of mind.

He had repented it long since, of course. It had been petty. Worse, it had been out of control.

Garin Braden was all about control.

He had forgiven himself. It was mere youthful folly. And he had accepted – even embraced – the consequences.

"And the blackmailer?" de Souza asked.

"He will trouble you no further, Eminence."

The flesh merchant had proved unwilling to see reason. Consequently he had suffered a fatal accident two days before, when his vehicle had overturned on a treacherous back road, breaking his fat, greasy neck. Or at least, so read the official finding.

It would do no good to Cardinal de Souza for his enemies to come into possession of evidence of distasteful acts. Powerful men – and Cardinal de Souza was powerful indeed – had many enemies.

Garin knew all about that, too.

The cardinal clutched the envelope protectively against his undershirt, which was sweat soaked and glued to his matted, graying chest hairs. "I thank you, my son," he said. "You have performed a great service. Not just to me, but to the church."

"My pleasure to serve," Garin said.

He thought it a great pity his old master, Roux, was so sunken in self-righteousness and hence self-pity. Roux hadn't changed much over the years. He was still in the grasp of the same vices as five centuries ago – wine, women, gambling, a tendency toward sloth.

Garin, meanwhile, had explored without compunction the furthest extremes of human behavior, vice and virtue. He had jaded himself with excess – and spent decades in self-denial so total it had excited both envy and suspicion among the Christian Trappists, Sufi dervishes and Tibetan Buddhists in whose monasteries, and more, he had studied and meditated. Garin had seen, and done, it all.

"And the sword, Eminence?" Garin asked.

The balding head nodded gravely. "You served us well in that, too, my son. It was a grave matter you called to our attention."

Garin thought about his youthful betrayal of Roux's protégée. For half a millennium Roux had attempted to make amends. Whereas Roux liked to steep himself in drink and self-pity and rail against the modern world, Braden embraced it with both arms.

But suddenly there was a terrible threat. The loss and breaking of Joan's holy sword had frozen them in time. The rediscovery and reforging of the blade threatened the status quo.

Indeed, Braden had initially feared he would simply age all at once, like the head vampire at the end of a horror film – drying to dust and blowing away. That had not happened. But he woke each morning alert to every pang, and each time he looked in the mirror, scrutinized beard, eyebrows, head for the telltale appearance of a gray hair. The existence of the sword was a threat to his existence. If Roux could not understand that – or worse, was fool enough to welcome the prospect of oblivion as a rest from his endless bouts of guilt and self-recrimination – then so much the worse for him. Garin would do what needed to be done.

He would do whatever was right for Garin Braden.

Just as he had always done.

Cardinal de Souza looked up with a bushy gray eyebrow raised. "If your information is correct?"

"I am likewise scrupulous about my information," Garin said smoothly. "And Your Eminence knows my resources are vast. Would I have troubled your Eminence with a mere fairy story?"

"No. No, of course not. Forgive me." De Souza shook his head and mopped his brow again. His breathing had mostly returned to normal. "It's just that what you told us was so...difficult to credit."

"In this modern world of ours, with its vaunted science and reason," Garin said, "I can see how that would be so."

"Nonetheless it is as well to have certain...spiritual realities recalled to us. Even to princes of the church."

"So you have done me the honor of taking my warning seriously, Eminence."

"Just so. I myself spoke to God's Hound before he left on this mission of his. He goes, you see, to investigate whether something demonic lies behind these apparitions in New Mexico." He shook his head. "His superior, Secretary Cangelosi, insists he actually finds such infernal influences. And dispatches them in a most efficient way."

"God's Hound?" Garin asked.

"It's what we call this Walloon Jesuit. He looks like a hound. He is tenacious as a rabid dog. And can be as ruthless. Domini Cane."