Max Meladze

 is a character on The Recruit. She is portrayed by Laura Haddock.

Biography
Max is a former asset of the CIA who helped the agency through her contacts in Belarus, but has since turned on the organization. She locked up in Arizona, on trial for murder. She writes to the CIA, hoping to leverage sensitive and potentially dangerous information she gathered during her time spent working for US intelligence to free herself from prison.

Max could do serious damage if she goes public about her past activities, so CIA lawyer, Owen Hendricks, will need to use negotiate to prevent an international incident.

Throughout The Recruit
Max sends graymail to the CIA, threatening to reveal CIA secrets, unless they help free her from prison. She is held in an Arizona prison for beating a man to death. When the graymail is handed to the new recruit Owen Hendricks, he discovers that her threats seems legitimate, as she has knowledge of code names that no one outside the CIA would know.

Owen meets Max is prison. When Max notices how young and inexperienced Owen is, she loses interest and asks him to send over someone who can actually help her. However, they eventually make a deal to help out each other. Owen would help Max get out of prison, if she did not reveal the CIA secrets that she knows. Max agrees, as she is desperate to return home.

Max tells Owen that she has confidential CIA documents in a storage room. When Owen goes to the storage to retrieve the bag of documents, he is approached by two Spanish-speaking men, who point their guns at him and order him to hand over the bag. Owen makes a run for it, but the two eventually catch up to him. Upon opening the bag, acid comes out, burning the faces of the two men. Owen grabs the bag and runs. He realizes that the bag actually contains cash, not confidential documents. When speaking to Max about this, she tells him to hand over the cash to her associates.

At court, Max taunts Kelly, the distraught daughter of the man she murdered.

While in prison, Max needs to buy a phone, and is directed to Cora, an old friend. Several years prior, Max let Cora stay at her place for a few weeks, and instructed her to hide inside the house, not to order food or invite anyone over. When Max discovered that Cora invited a man over, she kicked the two of them out. Cora ended up being badly beaten up by the man. Later, Max confronts the man about beating up Cora. He did not see anything wrong with his actions, and Max proceeded to beat him to death with a crowbar. She took his bag of cash and left.

Max calls the bakery that Xander Goi visits every day to get his full name. She sends him a special order, containing a threatening note.

Owen visits Max in prison and reveals that the CIA wants to make her an asset in Belarus again, due to her connections with the FSB. Max believes that they want to send her back to Belarus, because it would be easier to kill her off US soil. Owen tells her that she needs to prove that she is worth more alive than dead. Max also mentions that she has learned that he met with Xander Goi in Vienna and sent him a note.

Max asks Cora to find out the name of the witness, who turns out to be Danny Woodrow, a man who lives alone in a trailer outside Flagstaff.

Appearances

 * The Recruit