BOSTON (AP) — The information needed to decipher the last remaining unsolved secret message embedded within a sculpture at CIA headquarters in Virginia sold at auction for nearly $1 million, the auction house announced Friday.

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The winner will get a private meeting with the 80-year-old artist to go over the codes and charts in hopes of continuing what he’s been doing for decades: interacting with would-be cryptanalyst sleuths.

The archive owned by the artist who created Kryptos, Jim Sanborn, was sold to an anonymous bidder for $963,000, according to RR Auction of Boston. The archive includes documents and coding charts for the sculpture, dedicated in 1990.

Three of the messages on the 10-foot-tall sculpture — known as K1, K2 and K3 — have been solved, but a solution for the fourth, K-4, has frustrated the experts and enthusiasts who have tried to decipher the S-shaped copper screen.

The artwork resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side has a series of staggered alphabets that are key to decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side.

One person has contacted Sanborn regularly for the past two decades in an effort to solve K4, and Sanborn received so many inquiries he started charging $50 per submission. Sanborn decided to sell off the solution to K4, putting it in the hands of someone he hopes will keep its secrets and continue interacting with followers.

Artist Jim Sanborn sits behind a proof of concept piece for the Kryptos sculpture during a press conference at the International Spy Museum, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

RR Auction said the winner will get a private meeting with Sanborn to go over the codes, charts and artistic intent behind K4 and an alternate paragraph he called K5.

The purchaser’s “long-term stewardship plan” is being developed, according to the auction house.

Sanborn’s roughly 50 public sculptures include a memorial for a 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas.

The archive auction was almost derailed in September when two Kryptos sleuths found Sanborn’s original scrambled texts in the artist’s papers in the Smithsonian.

The sale went ahead but was changed from offering only the secrets to K4 to selling his entire archive.

“The important distinction is that they discovered it. They did not decipher it,” Sanborn told The Associated Press. “They do not have the key. They don’t have the method with which it’s deciphered.”

The Palace Theatre in downtown St. Paul is suing Wrecktangle Pizza over the short-lived Wrestaurant at the Palace, claiming that the Detroit-style pizza makers still owe the theater upwards of $1.6 million more than a year after their joint restaurant venture shut down.

Wrestaurant opened in early fall 2023 in the spot formerly home to Wild Tymes but quietly closed about a year later amid extensive water damage to its building, which had been purchased in early 2023 by now-troubled Madison Equities while restaurant plans were in the works.

First Avenue, which co-manages the Palace Theatre, opened a new restaurant called the Palace Pub in the location this summer. Unlike Wrestaurant, the Palace Pub is fully operated by First Avenue, operations director Marc Dickhut said at the time.

Wrestaurant earned plaudits when it opened for its creative menu and modern, redesigned interior. The Palace Pub, for its part, looks quite similar to its predecessor in decor and now offers a more casual bar-fare menu and a selection of arcade games.

In a lawsuit filed in Hennepin County Court last week, the operators of the Palace Theatre — which owned 51 percent of the restaurant, to Wrecktangle’s 49 percent — claim that they agreed in 2023 to front money for both their own and Wrecktangle’s portions of startup and operating costs, a total investment the theater estimates at around $3.3 million. That loan for Wrecktangle’s portion was fully guaranteed by Wrecktangle co-owner Alex Rogers, according to court filings.

However, the lawsuit claims, none of that loan has been repaid. With interest and other fees attached, the Palace claims in their lawsuit that Wrecktangle owes “an amount to be proved at trial but reasonably believed to be in excess of $1,650,000.00.”

Neither Rogers nor a representative of First Avenue responded to requests for additional information Friday.

For its part, in a response to the lawsuit filed in court this week, Wrecktangle appears to admit to not having made payments on the loan but countered that it is the Palace, in fact, that has failed to uphold part of the deal.

In its own filing, Wrecktangle says that the Palace never properly dissolved the joint LLC behind the restaurant nor took over Wrecktangle’s 49 percent ownership interest, and has continued to use equipment purchased by the joint LLC to now operate the Palace Pub. The theater, Wrecktangle says in its filing, has not financially credited the pizza company for profits and losses made using equipment in which it still has an ownership stake — which Wrecktangle characterized as a bad-faith move that calls into question the validity of the Palace lawsuit.

In response, the Palace denied these allegations, reiterated its claims of Wrecktangle’s own wrongdoing and noted that the Palace Pub has yet to turn a profit.

From here, unless they reach a settlement in the meantime, both Wrecktangle and the Palace have tentatively agreed to go to trial in November 2026.

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PITTSBURGH – Even though the Wild removed the injured reserve tag from center Nico Sturm on Friday following their morning skate at PPG Paints Arena, coach John Hynes said the season debut for the German faceoff specialist likely will not come until Sunday afternoon in Winnipeg at the earliest.

And with Ryan Hartman and Marco Rossi both still out with lower-body injuries, that meant a second game — and maybe more to come — with rookie Danila Yurov centering the team’s top line between Mats Zuccarello and Kirill Kaprizov.

Things could hardly have started better for Yurov in his debut as the team’s top-line center. Less than two minutes into what would eventually become a 4-3 shootout win over Carolina late Wednesday night, Yurov fed a pass to Zuccarello, whose long-range shot deflected off defenseman Brock Faber and into the net, giving Yurov his third career assist.

“I think that probably was his first shift with those guys, so that probably relieves a little bit of the nervousness going into it and helps settle in,” Hynes said on Friday morning in Pittsburgh.

In the immediate aftermath of the Carolina game — in which the Wild were on the defensive for long stretches after getting 2-0 and 3-1 leads, then hanging on to get the two points — Hynes had a more frank and critical assessment of the entire top line. It was noted that, for an extended stretch late in the second period that night, the trio of Zuccarello, Yurov and Kaprizov did not see the ice. But after taking a more detailed look at things, the coach said Friday that what he saw from the three, and Yurov especially, was encouraging.

“He plays a good two-way game. I felt that he made a nice play on (Faber’s) goal,” Hynes said. “Very good on breakout support. I think he can fit well with those guys too because he can transport the puck.”

Signed by the Wild in May after he was the team’s first-round pick, 24th overall, in the 2022 NHL draft, Yurov had played parts of the previous five years in the Kontinental Hockey League in his native Russia. He entered Friday night’s game in Pittsburgh with two goals and three assists in 16 outings at the NHL level.

“He’s making plays, he’s very responsible, he’s always in the right spot. The offense is going to come,” Wild forward Matt Boldy said after the Carolina game. “It’s hard. It’s not that easy, especially as a young guy playing center and having a lot of responsibility, and then playing with Kirill and Zuccy is a whole beast on its own. I thought he was awesome.”

Keeping it in the room

The players who will talk about it admit that it helped turn things around when Wild captain Jared Spurgeon called a players-only meeting on Halloween. It allowed the members of the team a private forum to air their concerns about why Minnesota had put up a 3-6-3 record to that point.

But hockey also has a strict unwritten code that things said behind closed doors are intensely private. They often like to “keep it in the room” as is the game’s common language.

So, while players like Spurgeon and Faber will talk in general terms about what came out of that meeting, and how it helped the Wild to a 7-1-1 mark in their next nine, a more common response is the one offered by Boldy when he was asked about the meeting and what came from it.

“Yeah, it was good,” he said, and did not elaborate. Asked about the meeting a second time, Boldly offered the bare minimum.

“It was a good meeting,” Boldly said.

Keeping it in the room, clearly.

At long last, Bogo’s back

Shelved for more than a month with a lower-body injury, defenseman Zach Bogosian was eager to re-enter the lineup versus anyone, even if it meant going head-to-head versus future Hall of Fame forward Sidney Crosby on Friday night, as Bogosian played for the first time since getting hurt on Oct. 17 in Washington.

Skating for the past few weeks as he made his way back to playing health, Bogosian admitted on Friday that what Tom Petty once said is true: the waiting is the hardest part.

“Definitely it’s not very fun sitting around,” said Bogosian, who, entering the meeting with the Penguins, had played five games this season and was looking for his first point. “It’s a challenge in itself. The way I look at it, every time you hit a little bit of adversity, you just get through the situation, and this is no different. It feels nice to be back.”

With Bogosian healthy, the Wild scratched Daemon Hunt from the lineup on Friday and sent defenseman David Jiricek back to the Iowa Wild.

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U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar met with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican Friday with a group of Ukrainians who are working to help return more than 19,000 children abducted by Russian forces during the war.

Klobuchar has pushed for support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion of that country in 2022. The Minnesota Democrat was invited by the Ukrainians to join their delegation advocating for the return of children.

“Pope Leo is a true moral force for peace and justice and a champion for children around the world. It was an honor to meet him as part of our mission to bring home the Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and chart a path towards peace and healing for Ukraine,” said Klobuchar, in a statement. “We cannot accept a world where children are abducted during wartime and used as hostages for negotiations. The United States must remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine’s fight for freedom, and we should all heed Pope Leo’s example of serving those in need, pursuing the common good, and calling for peace.”

Also during her meeting, Klobuchar presented the Pope with a resolution honoring the victims and survivors of the mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis this summer.

During her visit to Rome, Klobuchar also spoke met with other Vatican officials to talk about efforts to return children abducted by Russia. Klobuchar has worked on legislation aimed at the recovery of Ukrainian children with U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican.

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The Ukrainian delegation includes four children who were taken by Russian forces and have been reunited with their families.

There have been 19,546 confirmed reports of unlawful deportations and transfers of Ukrainian children to Russa, Belarus or Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, according to Ukrainian authorities. As of Oct. 9, about 1,800 have been returned.

According to a State Department report on human trafficking, Russia recruits or uses child soldiers, has a state-sponsored policy or pattern of human trafficking, and is among the worst hubs globally for human trafficking.