Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman

in his car, but the bearded young man was up a short time later to continue toward New York City.
    Thursday, September 10, 2009
    At a morning videoconference with FBI agents from New York, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and Denver, there were more questions than answers. They still did not know what Zazi was planning or why he wasin such a hurry to get to New York that he would drive 1,800 miles in two nearly sleepless days. Certainly, on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, the calendar was all but screaming at them. If Zazi was being directed by al-Qaeda and coordinating with a cell inside the United States, the FBI had no idea who was involved. And Cummings was ticked that the surveillance team had let the white van, maybe its best lead so far, vanish into the night.
    Back in Denver, Davis and Olson had round-the-clock surveillance on Zazi’s family. In New York, the walls of the command center were covered in growing patches of easel paper. A timeline of Zazi’s travels and a map of his relationships was coming into focus.
    They didn’t know whether the young man had anything dangerous in his car, but they all agreed on one thing: They could not, under any circumstances, allow Zazi into New York City as long as there was any possibility that the car might contain a bomb. Unspoken was the fact that, if Zazi were to blow himself up in northern New Jersey, that was one thing. Blowing himself up on the east side of the Hudson River, however, was quite another. If word got out that the FBI had allowed a suspected terrorist to enter New York the day before the 9/11 anniversary, the bureau would look terrible. Even if Zazi never managed to launch an attack, the FBI could expect to be skewered by Congress and in the press. Somebody had to stop Zazi and get a look in his car.
    But getting that look would have to be done in a way that didn’t arouse his suspicion. He’d already been stopped once, and the FBI didn’t want to press its luck and signal to Zazi that he was being followed. If it turned out that there was nothing in the car, the agents wanted him unsuspecting and relaxed, or at least as relaxed as anyone can be after driving for more than a full day.
    All signs were that Zazi was headed for Queens. He used to live there. He’d told Corporal Lamb by the side of the road in Colorado that he was going there. And he’d text-messaged his friend Zarein Ahmedzay, who lived in Queens, that he would arrive Thursday.
    The easiest, most logical route to Queens was to pass through the island of Manhattan. a fact that worked in the FBI’s favor. Everyone agreed that the two most likely ways for Zazi to enter New York were through the Holland Tunnel, connecting New Jersey and Lower Manhattan, or the Lincoln Tunnel, which feeds traffic into Midtown. Since 9/11, police had occasionally set up checkpoints at bridges and tunnels. They could do it again and make Zazi’s stop look random. Nothing could look out of the ordinary.
    That meant the FBI could definitely not make the stop. Black unmarked cars outside the tunnel and men in dark suits would advertise that something serious was afoot. A curious driver, delayed by the inevitable traffic backup, might call in a tip to a reporter, and before Borelli knew it, he’d be watching the whole thing live from the TVs on the wall of the command center. Nearly a decade had passed since 9/11, but even a whiff of a security issue in New York was still big news.
    The police contingent on the task force, led by Jim Shea, wanted the NYPD to make the stop. It could post task force officers in blue uniforms on the bridge, and nobody would suspect this was a counterterrorism operation. The detectives on the task force had top-secret clearances, meaning they knew exactly what the stakes were and what they were looking for.
    But bridges and tunnels belonged to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency that controls much of the region’s transportation infrastructure. Its technological