Martin Greer peered out the window coolly. Debonair. Handsome. Dangerous, yes. Perhaps he could even be mistaken as Presidential. He was a Spy, in a Spy Organization, for real. RFOGIIIOA[1]. It was government work, secret government work, so secret it wasn't safe to reveal what the acronym even stood for.
His job was to coordinate The Schedule. To hide the president ... no don't even think that ... The Package. Every day The Schedule was updated, with The Package hidden amongst it. He, Martin, contributed to updating it. The key was to scramble everything thoroughly every day. Thoroughly. Unpredictably. Beyond Unpredictable. The Opposition would never see through it.
But How?
How?
He opened The Envelope. Martin swapped tokens 91 and 15 in tomorrow's Schedule, and 47 and 38 ... No! ... 37! That would fox them. And 2 with 1. Yesterday he had swapped nothing at all! Yesterday's final pattern had been included. He read it over. Scowled. No, those bumbling boobs in Consensus had scrambled it anyhow. Here he was, Genius Spy, and most of the time they just ignored his input. Blast it. No, let's try 99 instead of 37.
The clock ticked.
He still had to add a secret message. In a secret code. Secretly.
Oh so much work. But such important work. Spy Work.
The clock ticked. A robin warbled outside his window. At least, it was PRETENDING to be a robin. You couldn't be too careful.
Today he'd gone to the wrong room again. They changed his room every day, out of secrecy. Couldn't be too careful, RFOGIIIOA. The Envelope had a note telling him tomorrow's room too. Room 53. 53. Martin took off his shoe, wrote "53" on a fortune cookie paper, and put it in. Took it out again and burned it. Whisps of smoke and sulfur in the air. He dusted the ashes into the wastebasket. "35". In his shoe. Martin always thought one step ahead like that. In every room, one drawer of the desk always had a ready supply of fortune cookie papers.
Martin Greer was a Spy. A good one. He had to be. His country was depending on him. He squinted dangerously and started designing his daily Secret Code.
[1] RFOGIIIOA, Rooms Full Of Grossly Incompetent Idiots Incapable Of Action, was a secret cold war program that hid the president by constantly rotating his office among many identical offices staffed by decoys. The job of scrambling the offices was left to the decoys. In reality, the president was not in any of the offices, but instead in a secure secret remote location. Russia of course was aware of all this and ignored the whole mess. RFOGIIIOA was eventually exposed by the news and cancelled as a complete waste of taxpayer money. The best that could be said for it was, as huge wastes of taxpayer money go, it was smaller than most.
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts.