Rebekah Brooks has denied giving evidence from a "carefully presented and prepared script" as prosecutors ended their cross-examination of the former News International chief executive in the phone-hacking trial.

It was put to her that she had a "meteoric rise" through News International from the day she joined as a researcher in 1988 to the day she became chief executive in 2009 and it was impossible that she knew so little about the charges against her.

Prosecutor Andrew Edis QC said: "I'm going to suggest to you that that is quite untrue. You were running your world and not much happened in it which you did not want to happen when you were top of the tree. You were the boss."

Over 13 days, Brooks has testified that she did not know or was not involved in alleged unlawful activity by her co-defendants during her editorship of the News of the World and the Sun.

He continued: "You were the editor and very much aware of what these people were doing," he said.

Barely audible, she responded: "Which people?"

Edis proceeded to list six people including the News of the World's former managing editor Stuart Kuttner, her personal assistant Cheryl Carter, and her husband Charlie, who have all pleaded not guilty to charges linked to the trial, and two who have pleaded guilty – the paper's former chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck and the paper's former head of investigations Greg Miskiw. The sixth individual on Edis's list was a reporter at the Sun, who cannot be named for legal reasons, but whom the jury have been told requested Brooks's approval for payments to a Ministry of Defence official for stories.

Brooks responded: "That's not true."

Edis put it to her: "Your evidence has been a carefully presented and prepared script and bears little relationship to the truth about these offences."

Brooks replied: "It hasn't."

Ending five days of cross-examination, Edis summarised Brooks's defence.

"Your evidence is that you had what was really a meteoric rise in your profession. You started as a researcher in 1988 and finished as CEO in 2009 having been editor of two major newspapers, which is a particularly stunning achievement isn't it?"

Brooks responded: "These are the facts of the story."

Edis put it to her that "These are highly demanding jobs, yes, in a very competitive industry?" She replied: "Yes." She agreed that she had "described it as a tough world" in evidence and when he put it to her that she was "extremely good at it", she replied that "it's difficult to say that about yourself" but she hoped that she had published good newspapers.

Edis then proceeded to summarise her defence on each of the counts against her: that Mulcaire and Miskiw kept phone hacking from her; that she did not know that "books were cooked" to disguise Mulcaire's £92,000 contract; that she did not know her former PA Cheryl Carter had removed seven boxes of notebooks labelled as belonging to her the day after it was announced the News of the World was closing; and that she did not know Charlie, her husband, was going to conceal bags containing a laptop and pornographic DVDs behind a bin on the day of her arrest.

Earlier on Wednesday Brooks described how she felt "poorly" and so ill she was like "a zombie" on 18 July 2011. It was the day her husband discovered the bags he had hidden behind bins in an underground car park had gone missing and ultimately handed to the police.

She said she knew nothing of what her husband had in mind that day and described the decision as "impulsive" and "a really really stupid" thing to do.

She also denied knowing that Carter had removed the boxes of notebooks from the archive.

She said when Carter told her she had been interviewed by police in late 2011 and had told her she had been asked about the boxes, it didn't strike her as odd as no alarm bells went off in relation to the material.

Brooks told jurors she was more concerned for her PA being interviewed by police.

Under re-examination by her defence counsel, Brooks told jurors she would have been "very unhappy" if she had been told in 2002 that any of her team on the News of the World had hacked Milly Dowler's phone and discovered a message suggesting the missing schoolgirl was alive.

She would have been more unhappy if the person who told her was Andy Coulson, her deputy with whom she had an on-off affair.

"I can't see one scenario which does not lead me to a conclusion, if you think she's alive, call the police straight away. If someone had told me about it I would have been very unhappy."

Asked by her counsel Jonathan Laidlaw QC if it would have been any different if the person who told her was Coulson, she replied: "I think I might have been more angry because I would not have expected it of Andy at all."

Both Brooks and Coulson have pleaded not guilty to the charge that they were involved in a conspiracy to hack phones.

The case continues.