Yael Azoulay is a negotiator for the United Nations.
That is what her record shows and what she would call herself if asked. It sounds reasonable and normal and something almost tame and boring. It is also not even close to what she actually does.
True, she works for the United Nations and she does deal in negotiations but she is the one who gets called in when other ways done by "normal" representatives from the U.N. fall through. When that world body is pretty much told to take their offers and put them in unpleasant places, that is when the Secretary-General decides it is necessary to ask Azoulay to step in. That's usually when things go pear-shaped for the bad guys.
As the first recorded adventure begins, she is 35 years old and has been with the U.N. for the past 12. She holds dual citizenship from both America and Israel having been born in New York City to an American mother and an Israeli father. They lived in America until she was a teenager. Upon her parents divorce and her father heading back to Israel, she went there to live for a while. [She mentioned in a conversation that she had served a tour of duty there but that may have been part of her cover.] She did graduate from Columbia University so at some point she had to have moved back.
Her time with the U.N. has been extremely business and memorable. She worked in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, starting as an administrative assistant but rising through the ranks in diplomacy through hard work and an impressive sixth sense that came from her "acute sensitivity to other people's moods". "From there she had been promoted to the operations room, the department's nerve center, and soon started going out on field missions. In Afghanistan she caught the eye of Fareed Hussein, the secretary-general, who had made her his protege, causing admiration and jealousy in equal measure among her colleagues. Her UN ID card said she was a political adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Her actual job had no title. Officially, it did not even exist. But it was known, where it needed to be, that she spoke for the SG, and that her word was as good as his. And that meant she also spoke for the P5, the permanent members of the UN Security Council: Britain, the United States, Russia, China, and France. She was the most powerful woman on the planet, as long as she stuck to the script."
Sticking to that script is something she knows how to do. She also knows when not to do it.