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It’s always one of Pascal's favourites. Enough of them know German, but the others are all from even further south. Max is pretty much Austrian, which is really not the same as being from anywhere else in Germany.
And Berlin is magnificent. It's huge, millions of people, the voices and the rumbling of cars that roar around them, from the shittiest old VW to the newest Porsche. Pascal knows them all, its his job, maybe part of his culture. It belongs to him in the same way in which ridiculous skinny jeans belong to Max, tech to Taylor and bars to Antonio. But Germany, specifically Berlin, that has become Pascal's playground.
Down the south there is what used to be AVUS. Pascal loves the old hotel on the side, frequented only by truck drivers these days, no one really looks up at him, god forbid recognize him. The very rare times that they do, he can laugh it off, usually its enough to claim just a similarity. And from there on, its only a short drive into the city.
But what really happens in Berlin, happens underground. Pascal knows so. Would claim for every role that he grew up around here or around another city like this. It’s easy to lie, listen to enough songs, watch enough documentaries to lie like he’s a local.
Thats what he does in another dingy underground bar. For once not summer, but freezing november, none of that can be noticed in what must be supposed to be a basement. Theres old gen Techno blasting through too loud speakers. He wonders if the houses above aren’t vibrating from the force of it. But any house that handled the history of Berlin can handle it, and any house that was built new was built to withstand things like this.
He can feel the bass reverbrate though his ribcage, his lungs and heart. He doesn’t drink on the job, at least not when he doesn’t have to, but he still feels vageuly drunk. Maybe its the drugs in the air, the people around or the chemical smell of artificial fog.
He is supposed to meet an informant, potential infos on politically motivated attacks in Berlin. Internationally, the scene is getting rougher. But it’s not his task to safe the world, nothing he could ever do on his own, but when a USB-stick is slid into his back pockets, his black jeans tight, he knows he has what he came for and its time to get back.
He loves his Porsches and any other fast car he gets to drive on missions, but in the middle of any city he has to take pleasure with a rusted Golf. They remind him of his teenaged days, the silver of his early adulthood. He makes sure he isn’t followed, easy when he’s driving by some overpriced fast food place. The milkshake tastes like freedom he can only afford in the off season.
Berlin is beautiful by night, never standing still, but filled with blinding lights. He can hear cars with radios turned up roar by, children laughing and teens walking around. In another life, he would’ve liked to move to Berlin. But he doesn’t usually like to waste time on unreachable possibilities.
It’s a few weeks later when he is back at the Porsche HQ. Nico is new and a nice lad, all big smiles and they are already closer than he had ever been with Antonio. But he is nothing part of the Organisation, a nice racer, but he doesn’t know about the secret facility underneath the headquarters, why Pascal is almost impossible to hang out with because he’s so often traveling, everywhere and nowhere. Pascals fiancé knows he leads a dangerous live, but not all the details.
Sometimes he wonders, how they manage it. To hide it from guys like Nico, who are always around and still don’t seem to have a single clue. Maybe it’s the team that makes sure he sees nothing he doesn’t have to see, that they never have to share a space where Pascal would have to undress and risk showing off recent injuries.
But in a way, he likes that about Nico. The carelessness and the fact that he knows that Nico, the man across from him is real. Not some made up persona, something that always worried him with Max and whatever problem Jake seemed to have when it came to Pascal himself.
Pascal loves racing. More than anything, it’s his life, and he knows it’s the same for Nico. But simultaneously, he also knows how different his life is from Nicos. How sometimes he is jealous of the live Nico leads, with absolutely no care for anything but what happens in the car.
And Pascal loves to be in the car. Even when he crashes, even when it hurts, he even loved it in Sao Paulo not even a year ago, when he had feared to get seriously injured. But that was on him, like the crash in Germany all those years ago, something he could control. The one game he wasn’t just a powerless pawn in, but the player who made the moves, even if he lost sometimes.
The car is a lot easier to understand than international politics.
It’s a lot easier to understand Nico, too, than it is to understand any of the others. He doesn’t even want to get into whatever is wrong with the older guys, who had been around when the Formula E branch had been built up. Antonio is one of them, although he still doesn’t seem to be any closer with the others. Jev and Sam are particularly horrible, so it’s still a weird feeling to know Sam won’t be around anymore. They are serious, these days, taking over some of the highest stakes missions, and they have to hope Taylor isn’t too impressive or he could ruin their little world; it’s not Formula 1, but its racing and they love it, and maybe the great part is really that they can do it without any of the bullshit the F1 guys have to go through.
Pascal thinks of his first operations, the first operations he had heard about, from different teams and agents. Sometimes laughing, how rough they all had been back then, when the racing had been a bit unserious and the teams didn’t know any better either. It was so different to what F1 operations had been. But other times, in the dead of night, on a surveillance operation, or when someone was hurt and this inexplainable human urge overcame them to admit all their crimes, when names of the dead spilled from them or the fears of past operations. Those are the moments that haunt Pascal.
Pascal isn’t particularly close to everyone in the paddock either. He likes to think he is simply a bit introverted. He has his friends and he is nice enough to everyone and that should be enough. At least thats what he tells himself. He doesn’t think of the fear of losing, being responsible for someone else. Bad things happen, also to them, and even if they are trained most detailedly, have experience and do their best to come home save, there is never any proof that they all come home. Thats what they risk their loves for, that its them and not someone innocent. They are innocent, too, in a way. But all of them have the names that they had taken, the lives they had ended. If it has to be anyone, Pascal thinks, it has to be one of them. Even if he doesn’t want it to be anyone. But he is not a child.
The season is about to start up again and the training is getting more intense. Nico wants to train with him, get to know him better. They will be expected to do some stuff for social media. Maybe its good to indulge with Nico, someone save, he thinks.