Free Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman Page B

she’s “marking this phone.” The FBI can then trace the call and subpoena the phone company to find out what number was dialed moments earlier. Meanwhile, someone else has topick up the tail when the target pulls back onto the highway. There are times when an agent needs to race ahead, maybe to get gas or use the bathroom, and then catch up with his team and let someone else do the same. Other times, when stopping is impossible, surveillance agents—both men and women—turn to their empty coffee cups for relief and press on.
    It was a bad day, though, for Davis to be asking for surveillance backup. The FBI was preoccupied with another terrorism case, code-named Black Medallion. Agents were closing in on two men from Chicago who’d plotted attacks overseas and helped scout locations for a systematic shooting and bombing spree in Mumbai, India. Around the country, field offices were chasing leads and conducting surveillance on potential accomplices. At FBI headquarters, the bosses told Denver that they simply had no backup team to pick up Zazi in the Midwest.
    Davis had a solution. He had a team in Denver to spare, but they were many hours behind. Thanks to the traffic stop, though, they knew where Zazi was headed. There were only a few routes from Colorado to New York that made sense. He’d stay on I-70 for sure through Kansas and Missouri. The drive across those two states alone was ten hours, maybe a little less, given how fast Zazi was driving. If Davis could get his surveillance team to Missouri, it could pick up the tail as Zazi cruised by. As it happened, the Denver field office owned an old ten-seat Beechcraft King Air turboprop plane that agents used to respond quickly to remote areas of the state. Four Denver surveillance agents packed their radios and gear onto the plane, and, a few minutes after noon, they were bound for Saint Louis. Like tourists, they would rent cars at the airport. When Zazi finished crossing Missouri, they would be ready to pick up the chase.
    It was well past midnight when Zazi pulled into the first rest stop in Ohio, east of the Indiana line, about forty-five minutes outside Dayton. It had been a grueling full day of driving both for him and his pursuers. There was no gas or fast food at the rest stop, just a building with bathrooms, vending machines, and tourist brochures. There were twosmall parking lots, and, in the predawn quiet, the surveillance agents had to be extra careful to work unnoticed. If a bunch of cars pulled into the lot at the same time, the whole operation could be blown. One of the drivers, an FBI agent from Cleveland, steered his car to the far end of the lot, where he could observe Zazi inconspicuously. He watched as Zazi pulled the Impala into a parking spot next to a large white van. Zazi got out and went to the bathroom, and, from the agent’s vantage point, it looked like Zazi talked to the driver briefly. And though he couldn’t be sure, the agent believed he saw the van driver slip into Zazi’s car. It was a bad vantage point. He couldn’t tell if Zazi and the van driver, a white man, exchanged anything. When the van pulled away, the surveillance team was faced with a choice: split up to follow the van or have everyone stay on Zazi.
    Zazi was the priority. That much had been made clear from the top levels of the FBI. Art Cummings, the bureau’s top national security agent, who sits a few doors down from the FBI director in Washington, was getting regular updates on the pursuit. Across the Potomac River, in a building known as One Liberty Crossing, Jim McJunkin oversaw the FBI’s worldwide international terrorism operations. More than once, Cummings had told McJunkin, “Don’t lose him, Jimmy.” Cummings was asleep on the leather couch in his office. Nobody wanted him to wake up to a call that Zazi was gone because half the team had followed a white van.
    As the white van disappeared onto the highway, the FBI stayed put.
    Zazi was observed sleeping