Dimiter by William Peter Blatty

theory that the tactic had been founded upon was soon utterly blasted, demolished, by receipt of a report from Security pathologists dealing with the scar on the Prisoner’s arm.
     
The area in question is thought to be the site of an operation that appears to have been logical, and therefore, most probably performed by plastic surgeons. The most obvious feature is the absence of structures, such as follicles of hair and sebaceous glands. As there seems to be a likely donor site with attendant slight scarring and depigmentation high on the Subject’s inner right thigh, the procedure is deemed to be a graft, a finding consistent with the grossly discernible scar where the grafted skin joins the pre-existing skin, and with the difference in texture between the skin at the site of the graft and the skin that surrounds it. Beneath the graft there is noticeable thinning of the superficial skin as well as scarring of the underlying tissues, with a few aggregationsof inflammatory cells. In evaluating these data, there is probable cause, we conclude, to presume that the graft was meant to hide a vaccination.
     
    Sitting in the chill of his office at daybreak, the Interrogator blinked at the final sentence. Hide a vaccination? Who would do such a thing? To what end? Frowning, he put the report aside, and while the pink and blue flowers in a glass on his desk breathed death, his mind made a puzzling, angry leap to his people’s old backwardness, to their illiteracy, to the blood feuds and infant betrothals and the terrified, shrieking children penned up in dark corners for the first twelve months of their lives lest the demons should see them and do them harm. This but one of the numberless crippling superstitions made to seem almost credible, almost sane, by belief in a suffering, bleeding God. Vlora glanced down at his hand atop the desk. It had curled itself tightly into a fist. He unclenched his fingers. They continued to tremble. He had been one of those children of the dark.
    Vlora turned to look out at the morning street and the pewtery light of dawn seeping in, glowing softly on the fog enshrouding the city so that portions of buildings protruded here and there like gleams of ghostly rubble. Why had he thought of such things? he wondered. Vexed, he looked down at the pathology report: “. . . meant to hide a vaccination.” What could it mean? He didn’t know. But as he shifted his gaze to the photograph of his time-lost wife and child, he caught his breath at the sudden and disturbing recollection that it was not until after a scourge of smallpox had scythed through the land more than thirty-five years ago that the practice of infant vaccination had made its appearance in Albania.The Prisoner, a man in his forties, was born a few years before that time, and, if a native Albanian, could not have been vaccinated! . . .
    Vlora shuddered. The room seemed colder. Who would have the need or even
think
of the need to conceal the telltale vaccination other than a formidable enemy agent on a mission of power and unthinkable menace? Vlora brooded on the blind man’s eerie report and the perfectly flawed Albanian dentistry; on the strangled dog in the wood and the spectral, unsettling Selca Decani. If the Prisoner wasn’t a foreign agent, Vlora concluded, then he must be a devil.
    “Or both,” he murmured.
    He’d once heard of such a legendary agent from Hell.
    That night Vlora slept with the demons.
    Then events took a turn that was wholly confounding. Early on the morning of April 3rd, cutting short his visit to an ailing father, there returned to Tirana from Beijing at Vlora’s urgent and imperative summons, a tall, gaunt Chinese Army medical officer, Major Liu Ng Tsu, a drug-hypnosis interrogation expert assigned as an adviser to Central Security. On the third and the fourth, Vlora briefed him and allowed him to study the written record. On the fifth there was action. The Prisoner, kept sleepless for thirty-six hours