Nadia Yassir
Nadia Yassir is a zebra and the Deputy Unit Chief of ZSI's Crisis Coordination Center. She is introduced in the W-Series, holding the floor for the first eighteen minutes of "The Call" with the Unit Chief's chair empty and a citywide catastrophe on the board.
Background
Yassir has years on the CCC floor and, as of the night the grid goes red, two weeks in the deputy chair. She reports to Bill Buchanan, the Unit Chief, and works under Director Costa. She is the one who produces the black binder holding Luther's scenario annex from beneath a console.
Personality
She runs the drill cleanly and then does what no checklist step covers. Under a load meant for the chair above hers she starts to fray, a half-second between decisions, a request for a figure already on her own screen, and she never stops working. Once the weight has somewhere else to sit her voice comes back level, and she is willing to ask the obvious question in front of the whole video wall.
Series History
W-Series
In "The Call", Yassir takes the room to Condition RED when the weather-wall grid reads a catastrophic build-up under Reptile Ravine, with Buchanan away commissioning the backup site. Instead of trusting the instruments she has the monitoring desk raise the station by radio and then by phone, gets silence and voicemail, and sends a Counter-Terrorism Unit element to look at the building. She hands Luther the binder when he takes the operations chair and reads the scenario code into the room. When CTU reports the station empty and its own alarm panel screaming, she counts it as the fourth confirmation. At the severance decision she asks, up the floor and in front of the mayor, why the cut is not made at the Ravine itself, and gets the answer that there is no charge under the concrete over the Root, the one chamber the city swore never to open again. After the abort she reaches to clear the projected-release line from the wall and takes her hoof off it when Luther tells her to leave it: the room will watch that minute come.
Key Relationships
Luther Pawthorne
She holds his room until he can reach it and hands him the plan he wrote. His pause on the CTU breach channel is long enough that she looks up from the deputy console.
Bill Buchanan
Her Unit Chief, stranded at Copenhoofen on the one night the annex fires; she runs his floor with him watching from the video wall.
Trivia
- Nadia Yassir takes her name from Nadia Yassir of the television series 24, the analyst raised into acting command of CTU in the show's sixth season. Fellow Crisis Coordination Center staff Bill Buchanan, Chloe O'Brian and Edgar Stiles are drawn from the same series.