When last we saw Jack Bauer, in the finale of 24: Live Another Day, he was being helicoptered off to Moscow by some vengeance-minded Russians who wanted to seriously harm, then kill him. Did they carry through on their nefarious plan? Could Jack Bauer, the fictional character so heroic he almost makes the real world seem safer when he’s on our TV screens, really be dead?Sadly, it may be so. At least for now.24 executive producer Howard Gordon tells Yahoo TV that a script for another iteration of the real-time drama is currently being written by Emmy-winning 24 writers Evan Katz and Manny Coto, and — shockingly — does not include Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer spending another day of his life saving the world from evildoers. “Evan and Manny are writing a script right now, which, for the moment is a Jack-less 24,” says Gordon, an executive producer and writer on 24 since it debuted in 2001.“The possibility is always there for Jack… There’s an open door, basically, but I think both Kiefer and we, I think correctly, felt that this character needed a little bit of a break. We really believe that real-time concept is just a really cool narrative engine, so they’re telling a story, Evan and Manny, that I think is in the tradition of 24.”