Page 43 of Somebody's Watching Me
Liam pulled his phone out and started to search for something. “Sinclair had a following similar to Toby’s group.” He angled the screen so she could see. “Is this him?”
The guy in the picture looked nothing like Michael. “No.”
Tilting the screen, Liam showed Klausen, and then changed the image to another man. One she recognized immediately.
“That’s him.”
Klausen hissed, yanking out his own phone to type furiously. “This isn’t good, Cohen. If Sinclair and Tobias Miller are working together —“
“We have a serious situation.” Liam turned to her father. “Toby and Sinclair recruit in the same manner. A better world only if you do XYZ, just as I say. But where Toby’s followers mainly only harass us and advocate for his innocence, Sinclair’s people are much more dangerous.”
“Like, how?” Jamison asked.
“Lethal.” A grim line creased between Liam’s brows. “They continue to kill in his name. Bombing small government buildings or businesses associated with certain overseas assets.”
“And why the hell would they do that?” Samuel snapped, his gaze repeatedly returning to the parlor door. In their ups and downs regarding Zanmi, he never liked being too far away from Evie and the girls, even opting to work from home whenever he could.
“Sinclair entered the military when he turned eighteen and was recruited into special ops. From there, he spent the better part of a decade running missions,” Liam explained. “Whatever happened on those missions had him coming home pissed.”
“He wanted to dismantle the government from the inside out.” Head down, Klausen continued to shoot off messages from his phone. “It started slowly, a threat here or there. He’s charismatic and, as you said Ms. Fairweather, handsome. People flocked to him.”
“Just like they do with Toby,” her father concluded. “What does he use to draw them in?”
“A perfect world, as if there is such a thing,” Klausen replied. “Sinclair started by planting people in elections, then bribing the ones already in office. Once satisfied with that, he went further. He was the head of an EOD team while in service and decided to use his skills to make an impact. The first building was a state office in Nevada. It blew in the middle of the day with a daycare inside, leaving two children dead. Sinclair released a statement afterward, classifying them as justifiable casualties. He got more precise from there on out, taking down six government buildings in total.”
Listening to Klausen, Jamison didn’t realize her shivering had returned until Liam’s warm hand took hers. Their gazes locked, the weight of his scarcely contained anger staring down at her. She needed it. His concern helped ground her when all she wanted to do was dissolve into a puddle of tears on the floor.
A madman.
Micheal Sinclair was a madman and had come to their home to kidnap her.
“How is this guy a terrorist, and we’ve never heard of him?” Abe asked.
“Sinclair was stationed at Fort Leonard before getting out of the military, so he mainly hits spots in Kansas and Missouri.” Liam released her hand with a squeeze and turned to address the room. “While that first strike killed two kids, he’s been careful since, targeting specific government personnel.”
“So basically, the government has been keeping it quiet,” Samuel said with a sneer. “You guys seem to excel at covering things up.”
“I didn’t hear any complaints when we curbed the information coming out regarding your family,” Klausen returned, surprisinglyfinding a backbone. “The public didn’t need to know every dirty little Fairweather secret, did they?”
That had been a debate from the start. Jamison had argued that the more open they were with the public, the more sympathy they could garner. Then maybe Zanmi’s numbers wouldn’t continue to climb so high. Samuel and her father disagreed, thinking the world already knew more than it should.
“However, I’m willing to admit that I’m now glad for it. The less the public knows, the better. It helps us decipher the recent chatter as it comes down the line,” Klausen conceded, nervously fiddling with his tie. “We thought it involved Evie, but obviously we were wrong.”
“Evie?” Samuel charged the agent, who wisely hurried across the room. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Rowan lunged forward to hold Samuel back, and while that was all well and good, it seemed no one thought to restrain her father. Jamison gasped as Klausen went flying up against a wall.
“Start talking,” her father snarled as he pressed Klausen’s face into Simone’s new floral print wallpaper. “And I better not hear a single lie come out of your mouth.”
“It wasn’t solid information,” Klausen sputtered, fighting the hold on him. “It was only talk. Something about building a perfect family, but they needed women, and kept referencing Evie as an example.”
“Why was this withheld from us?” Samuel shouted, straining against Rowan’s grip. “We had a fucking deal, Klausen.”
Jamison blinked at her brother, surprised beyond anything. Yeah, Simone had told her of how her dad operated back in the day, but she would never have expected it of Samuel. To bribe a federal agent, one who could hardly stand to be in the same room as them, wasn’t the smartest move.
Her father gave Klausen a violent shake. “What else?”
“Make him stop.” Jamison tugged on Liam’s arm to get his attention. “We don’t need this.”
