MOLHEM BARAKAT/Reuters/Corbis

So what happens when the shark strikes? Freelancers don't have news organizations to leap into the breach; some don't even have health insurance. All they have are colleagues. And so with every kidnapping, a new informal network takes shape. Sometimes the publication to which a freelancer has been supplying work takes responsibility; sometimes it brusquely dismisses any obligation; rarely does anyone talk about what happened.14 (I was repeatedly urged to eliminate identifying details about kidnapped journalists, and I have done so in any case where the person's safety might be compromised.)

Journalists are deeply divided among themselves, and within themselves, as to the wisdom of maintaining a news blackout in the case of disappearances. The chief argument for doing so is that secrecy allows private negotiations to proceed unhindered. The chief argument against, however, is that it deprives the victim of the leverage of public pressure. After six weeks of a blackout with little progress, James Foley's family, along with GlobalPost, for whom he was filing stories, decided to go public in January 2013.15 Others have made a similar decision. So far, neither tactic has worked. In December, a group of news organizations -- including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, and AP -- released an open letter16 to "the leadership of the armed opposition in Syria" imploring them to stop seizing journalists and to help find those who have been taken. It seemed a desperate plea. ISIS doesn't negotiate, and it doesn't respond to public pressure.

By the time I arrived in Antakya in the last days of September, the journalistic body count had become almost absurd. Frank Smyth of the Committee to Protect Journalists had suggested I look up two Spanish freelance photographers headquartered there; days before I arrived, both were kidnapped on the way to Raqqa. A third Spaniard, Marc Marginedas, whose family agreed to make his kidnapping public, had been seized just outside of Aleppo. An Italian and a Belgian had just been released after five months. The former, Domenico Quirico, a veteran reporter for La Stampa, described a litany of humiliations at the hands of a band of thugs with an Islamic veneer. The revolution, he wrote, had been betrayed by "fanatics and bandits" who had made Syria "the Country of Evil .. where even children and old men rejoice in their malevolence."

In fact, the only Westerner in town was Barak Barfi, an Islamic scholar and fellow at the D.C.-based New America Foundation. Barfi was spending as much of his time looking for his kidnapped friends as he was reporting. He was fielding calls every week from desperate friends and colleagues of seized journalists.

One night, I was having dinner with Barfi when Andrea Bernardi, an Italian freelance videographer, came over to join us. "Did you hear about the guy that got kidnapped today?" he asked. Barfi, who had been fiddling with his phone, snapped to attention: "Who?" Andrea described the victim. Barfi clutched his head in his hands: A few weeks earlier, the man had slept on his floor in Antakya. Was it really true? Barfi sprang into an all-too-well-rehearsed routine, calling contacts at the State Department, the FBI, and officials of other governments, while fielding calls and emails from journalists who had just heard the news.

Barfi introduced me to Hamza Ghadban, a Syrian journalist who had worked for an Arabic-language broadcaster in London and then returned to Syria to cover the rebellion. Ghadban now operates from Antakya and travels widely across northern Syria. He was convinced, as many rebel sympathizers are, that the regime has subterranean connections with the foreign jihadists. He told me that the ISIS camp in Aleppo had been unscathed until the jihadists decamped, while the next-door headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, affiliated with the FSA, had been leveled by government artillery. In Raqqa, too, the ISIS base had not been shelled. It's also widely believed that in the summer of 2012, Assad released from prison some of the Sunni extremists who had fought American troops in Iraq, and who may then have joined with foreign fighters to form ISIS. Those fighters now seem at least as preoccupied with dislodging moderate rebels from key checkpoints and northern towns as they are with fighting the regime.

It's bizarre to think that Assad may have struck a deal with his bitterest enemies, yet the jihadists have vindicated in a spectacularly brutal fashion his longtime claim that he is not fighting Syrian patriots, but foreign terrorists. The rise of these al Qaeda affiliates has cut the ground out from Western critics who advocate international military support for the rebel cause. Leading figures like Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly stated that, for Washington, the Syrian war is not a simple choice between two sides. Whatever the case, ISIS has done far more harm to the rebels' cause than it has to the regime. In early December, the U.S. government temporarily suspended delivery of nonlethal aid to the moderate rebels, over concerns that it was being regularly seized by al Qaeda.

It was Ghadban who told me about Abu Nabil, the man who claimed to be negotiating for James Foley, the freelancer who had gone missing in 2012. Foley had been seized in Binnish, in Idlib province, along with a British freelance photographer whose family, unlike the Foleys, has chosen to keep a cloak of silence over his abduction. The Brit had been kidnapped before in the same region, and after his release had done something, which I cannot disclose here, to deeply anger Islamist rebels. For that reason, journalists believe that both were taken by Islamists, though perhaps later sold to the regime. (Philip Balboni, the CEO and co-founder of GlobalPost, says that he has no evidence that Foley was ever held by rebels.)

That's where Abu Nabil comes in. A bespectacled man in a green polo shirt with "Aviation Industry" stitched on the chest, he explained to me that he was a prominent Aleppo merchant, a contractor. "For more than 20 years, I've been working with high-ranking members of the regime," he said, as we sat in the cafe in Antakya. "I have very personal relations with some of them. I especially do a lot of business with intelligence officials." He said that he served as the owner of record of an expensive property in Aleppo that a senior intelligence official had purchased, but wished to keep secret.

The go-between was happy to explain his method. "When people first come to me," he said, "I ask for the names of the people kidnapped and the time and place of the kidnapping. Then I start making calls, usually to more low-level officials. I know a man at the central records office, and he can tell me whether the person is alive or dead." If the subject is alive, Abu Nabil starts ringing his contacts in the regime's 25 intelligence agencies. Twenty-five? He started ticking them off -- Palestine Branch, 215 Military Intelligence, etc. At that point, he says, the bargaining begins. Some are for sale, some not. The price always varies. Abu Nabil says that he is motivated by the "great injustices committed against the Syrian people" -- by both sides, he quickly adds -- though he plainly rakes off some fraction of the ransom.

Ghadban had seen what he considered convincing evidence that Abu Nabil could deliver. Earlier in 2013, he had been approached by acquaintances from Aleppo who were hoping to recover three rebels who had been taken on the battlefield, exhibited on TV, and convicted of terrorism. He brought them to Abu Nabil. "He checked," says Ghadban, "and came back and said, 'It will cost you $50,000.' I saw them hand over the money." Two of the three were released, and the remaining prisoner was expected out soon.

But Abu Nabil was also a brazen liar. Firas Tamim, the fixer who had been ferrying supplies across the border, joined us at the cafe and asked him about an abductee, whom the businessman claimed to know. When Abu Nabil left the table for a moment, Tamim told me that he had made up the name.

There was enough truth, or at least plausibility, to his account of Foley's abduction that Ghadban had, he said, taken Abu Nabil to meet with State Department officials in Istanbul. And Kroll, the security firm GlobalPost had retained, had sent its agents to exhaustively test his bona fides. But when they pressed him for a "proof of life" -- an answer to a question only Foley would know -- Abu Nabil came back only with answers to inconclusive questions they hadn't asked. Finally, he claimed that Foley was about to be released, but that never happened. "He never gave us any reason to believe any of his story," says Richard Hildreth, managing director of Kroll. Perhaps Abu Nabil can deliver with Syrians, but not Americans.

Perhaps the problem is the private security firms. None of the journalists or other activists who had run across the Kroll agents in Antakya thought they were making any meaningful inroads on the case. ("We don't tell people what we do," rejoins Hildreth. "We're not looking to print a story at the end.") I asked David Rohde if the private security firms that the New York Times had retained after he had been kidnapped had been able to resolve his case. "No," he said. But neither, in the final analysis, could American government officials or the gifted and deeply knowledgeable reporters who devoted themselves to the case.

Figures like Abu Nabil thrive on the agonizing mix of desperation and futility that suffuses the atmosphere on Syria’s borders.

Figures like Abu Nabil thrive on the agonizing mix of desperation and futility that suffuses the atmosphere on Syria's borders.

17 Map by FP, Map tiles by Stamen Design Kilis, Turkey

I kept my promise to Abu Abdulrahman not to cross into Syria; but just barely. In the border town of Kilis,17 a few hours east of Antakya, Barak Barfi and I walked through Turkish passport control to the no-man’s land between the two countries. The border guards could not fathom what we were doing, but ultimately waved us through. We walked down a well-maintained four-lane road. About 200 yards away stood the Syrian checkpoint, which was controlled by the Northern Storm brigade of the FSA. Beyond that were the low stone houses of the village of Bab al-Salama.18

18 Map by FP, Map tiles by Stamen Design Bab al-Salama, Syria 19 Map by FP, Map tiles by Stamen Design Azaz, Syria

Bab al-Salama had long been a popular crossing, with a good road leading straight to Aleppo. Now that route was like Russian roulette, with more than one bullet in the chamber. Even the moderate rebels at the checkpoint kept a list of journalists accused of some transgression, usually imaginary; if you happened to be on the list, you could be let through and then seized a few hundred yards down the road. Greater danger lay in Azaz,19 several miles to the south, access to which was controlled by ISIS checkpoints. Even Syrians told me that they had learned to give Azaz a wide berth.

This was the day after we had learned of the new abduction -- the man who had slept on Barfi's floor. At the time, Andrea Bernardi, the freelancer who broke the news at dinner, had plaintively asked: "Why do we still go into Syria? What are we learning? What's the story?" Those seemed like the sane questions to ask; whatever there was to be learned seemed small compared with the very real danger of abduction. This was the conclusion almost all major news organizations had reached. And yet I knew that some intrepid journalists, perhaps including Bernardi, who himself had been held captive by foreign jihadists for several days, would continue to find reasons, both noble and self-serving, to go inside.

Barfi and I stood in the middle of the road, facing south toward Syria. A sharp wind whirled plastic bags and bits of rubbish across the pavement. We turned around.

I called Alice Martins in Turkey a few days after I returned home. I asked if she knew about the new abduction; she did. "I was really upset," she said. "I know him quite a bit. He's someone we didn't think was in danger." She told me she had put off her plans to go back inside. The protective mantle of Ahrar al-Sham no longer seemed so reassuring. ISIS was extending its dominion across the North, draping the black flag of al Qaeda across the country. Martins wanted, more than anything, to tell the story of Syria, but she was no longer sure that she could. "I think," she said, "it's too crazy." Soon afterward, she returned to Brazil.