The Hunted

A few calls to the right people and Alex and Elena's request was stamped "expedite." A few weeks later they were ushered into a sterile room before a small panel of serious people, sworn to honesty, and asked to present an abbreviated version of their sad case. The panel looked bored and impatient initially. That quickly changed. For starters, Alex opened his shirt and offered a long, nauseating gaze at the hammer-and-sickle emblem fried on his chest. A minute later, out popped the photos of Alex's overall physical condition, blowups of the photos taken by the doctor two days after they landed at Kennedy International. They were color and close up. MP accompanied the visuals with vividly horrifying descriptions-see, this is where the chair broke on his leg; the bruised lumps here, well, those are fractured ribs; and so forth. The wounds were brutal. Several members of the panel gasped and looked away. The verdict was returned promptly.

Approved, but only conditionally-welcome to America, land of the free and the brave-now go out there and make us proud you're an American.

Just one glitch: you must have a job-a place of permanent employment before permission to apply for full residency was granted.

Any job with a domestic corporation was also easily traceable, and therefore out of the question, so Alex immediately contacted his old friend Illya Mechoukov. They had met four years before, when Illya was first toying with the idea of jumping into mass-market advertising. No such thing existed in the Soviet Union, at least not in the same sense as in the West, where big companies spent billions each year shoving their names out into the marketplace. Illya was young, only twenty-five, and seized with the progressive idea that he would mimic the huge Western advertising firms. His business would explode quickly, he was sure, and the money would pour in.

A great idea that instantly hit a brick wall. Illya was odd-looking, with a hooked nose, unbalanced features, long woolly hair, and a thick black beard that looked revolutionary. But he was filled with brilliant concepts that poured out of his lips in quick, nervous bursts. He was inventive and wildly creative; unfortunately, he was also far ahead of his time. The former communists had no idea what he was talking about, or why it mattered. People went to stores. They grabbed the item off the shelf. The very idea of spirited competition sounded confusing, possibly immoral. The notion of trumpeting your own product struck them as haughty, self-indulgent, a blatant waste of money.

Three minutes into his initial pitch in Alex's office, Alex leaned across his desk. "Okay, I've heard enough. Here's the deal: I'm buying you. Not just your advertising, you. I'll fund your company, but you'll service my accounts before all others. I'll be the chairman of the board, you'll be the president, the chief of daily operations, and the brains. It's your show to run, and I expect great results."

Illya tugged on his beard and briefly considered this remarkable offer. "You're kidding."

"Yes, it's a joke. That's why I am about to write a check for five million dollars. Buy the best film and printing equipment on the market, hire good people, and call me if you need more."

The company was legally incorporated in Austria, close to Russia's border and surrounded by cutthroat Western competitors. Alex insisted on this. Rivalry was healthy. To survive, Illya and his people would be forced to absorb the best Western practices, sharpen their own wits, and bring that state-of-the-art knowledge to the Russian market.

Better yet, Orangutan Media, as Illya had named it, was not technically part of Konevitch Associates. To get through the doors of Alex's competitors the firm had to be notionally independent. The only legal documents that evidenced Alex's financial interests were filed with the Austrian authorities. Thus, Orangutan slipped under Golitsin's radar.

Alex now offered to represent the company in America, and the timing could not be better. The big American corporations were floundering in Russia. All those years of a wall separating the two worlds left the Americans clueless about the local culture, local wants, local psychology. What worked like magic in the good ol' USA, resoundingly belly-flopped in Russia. The Pepsi generation caused deep bouts of head-scratching; how could a generation be defined by some stupid soft drink? Doctors recommending this pill or that antidote were unconvincing. Russian medicine was dreadful; anything they recommended was promptly blacklisted from the family shopping cart. And as for all those sports stars hawking products, another bust; who cared what some muscle-bound freak gobbled or drank or rubbed on his body?

Alex would make the rounds of the big American companies and sell them on Orangutan Media-an all-Russian outfit with a native feel for how to pitch to a home audience.