Minnie Chase Makes a Mistake by Helen MacArthur Page A

her into his world after all. She imagined that his voice had gone below the threshold of her conscious mind as he talked about waves and waxed boards on the non-stop flight across the Atlantic. 
    Minnie chose to work at her laptop sitting cross-legged on the bed instead of using the desk and chair in the corner of the motel room. After a more thorough search, she was not surprised to find out that Jones & Sword had completely erased her from its organisation. She had been locked out of its state-of-the-art computer system and it would take considerable time to hack into her deleted account because she had worked with some of the best mathematicians and coders in the world. She now had no access to the equations, algorithms and formulas she had worked on for the Greene Inc natural gas deal. It would remain the property of Jones & Sword until the paperwork was signed. She didn’t dare to even take a peek at the company’s source code on the server in case it triggered a tracking system that said she was attempting to remove code, an offence that would land her in jail. 
    There was nothing to remind her of what she had done and how she had done it. She would have to start at the beginning again and hope that her memory and the Pythagorean theorem didn’t let her down.  
    What did surprise her, though, was the fact that the colleagues with whom she had worked over the years had not attempted to contact her privately. She had become a ghost with a bad reputation – careless, unprofessional and foolish. It didn’t matter that she had an IQ of 172 and workaholic enthusiasm, all Minnie would be remembered for was her mistake. 
     
    Minnie didn’t expect the ‘simple route’ to produce leads but she had to start somewhere. Her first call was to the Greene Inc HQ in Silicon Valley. After waiting on hold time after time, Minnie finally spoke to someone who was in the position to give her some answers. The company receptionist stonewalled her for a while, eventually telling Minnie in no uncertain terms that there was no way she would even consider passing on any message to Greene. Reading between the sharp breaths and staccato phrases Minnie was sensing her extreme irritation and frustration. Under Minnie’s questions her fury increased, and probably with good reason. She must have been constantly fielding calls from many people demanding to speak to Greene: from the world’s media, from colleagues and from enemies alike.
    Having drawn a blank with the direct approach, Minnie remembered that in a previous life she had held a contact for his personal assistant, Meredith Lockhart. It wasn’t too difficult to recall it because Minnie never made a call using contact names or speed dials, she always keyed in the number manually. She had no difficulty in remembering sequences. It was her own telephone directory numbers game, a gift from her subconscious mind.
    She took the notebook that Angie had given her and played around with some numbers until she was confident she had the right sequence. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a number she had used often in spite of the amount of work she had done for Greene Inc over the last six months. This was down to a strict one-way control of communication: no one contacted Greene or his assistant, he decided when it was time to talk.
    Back to the number sequence, first attempt, fail. Second time, lucky.
    Minnie hesitated. The number had been confirmed by Meredith Lockhart’s voicemail message. The first option was to leave a message… maybe not. The next option was to hack into the woman’s saved messages in the hope that she could find a clue as to Greene’s whereabouts.
    Minnie was aware of the laws that existed, and were enforced, to stop people with her skills intercepting messages. This awareness caused her some anxiety because she did like to obey the rules. There was no anti-establishment side to her whatsoever; indeed, she loved adhering to rules. Rules went hand in hand with numbers