I unfold a second page. There is an article titled “Move to Stamp Out Corruption,” which peaks my interest. It details how Nigeria’s new military government arrested more than 200 individuals in an attempt to stamp out official corruption.

I move on.

I unfold several more pages, but nothing jumps out.

I’m about to give up when I find one last piece of newspaper tucked in the toe of one of the boots.

I pull it out.

Uncrumple it.

It is from page three.

The article is titled “POW Escapes from Russian War Camp.”

Immediately, I know the article is the reason my mom kept the paper.

A CIA operative teaching Mujahedeen interrogation tactics during the Soviet-Afghan War disappeared without a trace on April 13, 1981. He was thought dead. On January 5, 1984, he showed up at the American embassy in Iran. He’d been held captive in a Soviet prison camp for the past two and a half years and had escaped.

The CIA did not disclose the captive’s name, but I knew who the man was.

He was my mother’s research partner.

::::

Back inside, I flip open my mother’s file.

I want to make sure I have the dates right.

I do.

My mom went to Afghanistan on April 15, 1981, two days after the CIA operative disappeared. She stayed there for several weeks before returning in early May.

This couldn’t have been a coincidence.

Just as my mom went to Honduras a few years later to teach their militia interrogation techniques, this guy did the same with the Mujahedeen, who were the Afghani militants battling the Soviets.

My mother didn’t go — as she had a small boy (I was three at the time) — but more likely she stayed behind to continue her work on the Sleep Control Program. When her partner disappeared, she jumped on the first plane to Afghanistan to assist in the search and perhaps put her interrogation skills to good use with the Mujahedeen’s captured Soviets.

I flip open my laptop.

My gut instinct, the same gut instinct which tells me which stocks to buy and sell, the same one that made me millions of dollars over the course of the past decade, is telling me this guy was her research partner at the Sleep Control Program.

I need to find him.

They might not have disclosed his name in the Washington Post then, but certainly over thirty years later, his name had surfaced.

I Google search, “Escaped American POW from Soviet Prison Camp 1984.”

The name was disclosed.

The CIA operative was named David Sullivan.

The President’s father.

::::

I was looking for a connection from my mom to President Sullivan and here it was. My mother’s research partner at the Sleep Control Program was Conner Sullivan’s father.

I let out a long exhale.

The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place.