A Transit Zone Becomes a Snowden-Watching Zone Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images The passenger plane, Aeroflot flight SU 150 to Havana, from Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, on Monday before it took off without Edward J. Snowden. MOSCOW - The airport transit area here where Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American national security contractor, is believed to be planning his next move, has a Burger King, TGI Friday's and panoply of coffee shops. At dawn on Tuesday it was largely empty, with sleeping passengers stretched out on the floor and on rows of seats. A group of Japanese men sat on the floor into the afternoon alongside several empty and nearly empty whiskey bottles. There was also a constellation of V.I.P. salons with names like Galaktika and Blues, and a Soviet-looking Hall for Official Individuals accessible to a parking lot outside. A recent renovation has left the area, which stretches across the D, E and F terminals, airy and gleaming, with new features like the Vozdushny Ekspress, a small "capsule hotel" where journalists have been gathered since midday Sunday in hopes of getting a glimpse of Mr. Snowden. Many reporters, with purchased plane tickets that have given them access to the area, have spent sleepless nights patrolling the long halls of the transit zone, looking for witnesses among the janitors, cashiers and flight attendants. There have also been security personnel on patrol in plain clothes, some of them clearly monitoring the journalists. And especially when a Havana-bound Aeroflot plane that Mr. Snowden was believed to have been on departed from gate D28 on Monday afternoon, there were bystanders who looked both foreign and exceptionally curious, prompting speculation that they might have been intelligence officers sent by other countries. Journalists have spent days searching for Mr. Snowden in lounges and V.I.P. halls and behind locked doors throughout the transit zone, and at 3 a.m. one of them could be seen sitting dejectedly in a glassed-in smoking area. At times, the quest took on an air of desperation: reporters from a Russian tabloid covertly took photographs of a correspondent for The New York Times, then showed them to her and explained that they thought she might be Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks adviser who is believed to be traveling with Mr. Snowden.